Modeling of pedestrian evacuation under fire emergency based on an extended heterogeneous lattice gas model

An extended heterogeneous lattice gas (E-HLG) model is developed by introducing an altitude factor into the heterogeneous lattice gas (HLG) model. The altitude factor is used to describe the position height of lattice sites. Evacuation features from a terrace classroom are investigated through simulations using both the model and experiments. To study evacuation processes under fire emergency, an agent-based fire and pedestrian interaction (FPI) model is proposed. It is supposed that the possible moving directions of a pedestrian depend on the environmental temperature field, which is simulated by the software FDS. The walking speed reduction due to the visibility worsening in the FPI model is described by a multi-grid method. It is found that simulation results based on the extended HLG model are in good agreement with the experiments. The altitude factor plays a guidance role to the evacuation, and the fire notably delays the evacuation due to both the harmfulness of the high temperature field and the change of evacuation routes which results in frequent local jamming and clogging. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.