- Author
-
Lancaster, L.
- Title
- Comparison of Two Methodologies for Fire Egress Analysis.
- Coporate
- Clemson Univ., SC
- Report
-
Thesis
[date unknown]
35 p.
- Keywords
-
egress
|
methodology
|
algorithms
|
fire models
|
dynamic programming
|
occupants
- Identifiers
- HAZARD I; EXITT; ALGORITHM TWO
- Abstract
- It has been shown that many natural phenomena can be modeled by the use of mathematics. One such phenomena that has long intrigued some mathematicians is fire. These mathematicians, alongside physicists and other scientists, have recently made great advances in modeling not only the behavior of fire itself but also its smoke toxins. These advances in the study of fire have opened many doors of research. One such area of research is the study of fire egress. The fire egress problem is the study of people trying to escape from a burning building. Many questions need to be answered when studying this problem. For example: How do different people react psychologically to fire and how are those "differences" between people defined and determined? What is the shortest path out of the building? What is the safest path out of the building in regards to the properties of the fire and the destruction of the building? What levels of toxins and heat are lethal or disabling? A government agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST, has developed software called HAZARD I which models a fire hazard. The software is a set of procedures which not only allows the user to define a building and its occupants and choose the context of the fire but also simulates the fire and gives its consequences and the responses of the occupants. What we are concerned with in this fire egress problem is finding the optimal route out of the building for each occupant given the behavior and results of the fire. In the EXITT program in HAZARD I the route out of the building for each occupant is determined by finding the shortest path out of the building. However, certain paths may be blocked by EXITT due to smoke which is evaluated at certain time intervals of the fire simulation. We suggest a different way to evaluate the optimal route out of the building: multicriteria dynamic programming finds all pareto optimal nondominated pahts out of the building.