Simulation of standing versus crawling during evacuation from a smoke-filled room

Sammanfattning: Crawling is often the recommended method when evacuating from a burning room. In this study, an agent based crowd simulation in combination with a fire dynamics simulator is used in order to compare how well crawling evacuation compares to a standing type of evacuation. The scenarios were done in a model of a classroom at KTH with a burner of variable strength placed in front of the classroom and a variable number of evacuating agents. The results of this study showed that the simulations of a crawling evacuation strategy on average had worse results in most scenarios than a standing evacuation strategy. Both in terms of evacuation speed as well as the levels of toxicity in the agents. Due to issues of the model, it is not possible to say which evacuation strategy performs better. However, the study provides helpful insight for future studies of this field.