Enhanced evacuation with Professor Steve Gwynne
Increase familiarity with modelling applications beyond standard performance-based design and the sensitivity of such applications to the behavioural assumption made by the practitioner.
Key Topics
- Behavioural assumptions and their impact on evacuation modelling and safety assessment
- Potential for drills to enhance evacuation behaviour and how modelling might supplement this effort.
- The use of evacuation models to assess regulatory changes before they go into practice.
General
The brief seminar will include the following three topics, each of which will run for between 30-45mins.
We often make many assumptions regarding building occupant behaviour in routine scenarios and during emergency scenarios – especially in response to fire situations. These assumptions can have a profound impact on building design and emergency planning, and therefore on the life safety levels reached.
We will explore some of these assumptions, how credible they are, and the impact that any divergence between assumption and reality might have on our assessment of life safety using evacuation models. We are often mandated to conduct drills to train and measure occupant performance in response to fire emergencies. However, the rigour with which drills are conducted varies significantly between and within jurisdictions, along with their objectives, the scenarios examined, the data that is collected from them and the analysis conducted of the drill performance.
We will explore how to assess the costs and benefits of evacuation drills and supporting approaches that might be adopted to enhance training and assessment. We often deploy guidance and regulatory changes (especially prescriptive approaches) prior to quantifying the potential impact of such changes. We will examine a case study where performance-based design tools (e.g. evacuation models) were used to assess the potential impact of changes to regulatory guidance on evacuation performance.
This work was conducted in response to the 2017 Grenfell Fire. Examples will be provided throughout and frequent reference will be made to fire safety practice.
Learning Objective
- Increase familiarity with modelling applications beyond standard performance-based design and the sensitivity of such applications to the behavioural assumption made by the practitioner.
