Integration of Smoke Effect and Blind Evacuation Strategy (SEBES) within fire evacuation simulation

Many fire evacuation models have been proposed in recent years to better simulate such as an emergency situation. However most of them do not respect a recommendation of fire evacuation experts regarding the fact that evacuees should follow the boundaries of obstacles or wall to find the exits when their visibility is limited by smoke. This paper presents an agent-based evacuation model with Smoke Effect and Blind Evacuation Strategy (SEBES) which respects that recommendation by integrating a model of smoke diffusion and its effect on the evacuee's visibility, speed, and evacuation strategy. The implementation of this model enables us to optimise the evacuation strategies taking into account the level of visibility. The obtained simulation results on a realistic model of the Metro supermarket of Hanoi confirm the important impact of smoke effect and blind evacuation strategy on the number of casualties. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.