Abstract
Children are neglected in today’s fire safety design and fire safety modeling. The purpose of this study is to validate the common evacuation model Simulex with respect to children. The model was set up using the standard settings for children available in Simulex. Results on travel speed, horizontal and on stairs as well as the flow through doors for 9 day care centers are compared to data from full scale evacuation experiments for children in the age of 0–2 and 3–6 years. It was found that the walking speed found in the simulations in Simulex overestimates the walking speed found in the exercises for both age groups, except for a few older children running. Furthermore, the simulations overestimate the travel speed on stairs, except for the initial escape in the familiar staircase. Also the prediction of the total evacuation times was shorter than in the experiments. In general Simulex did not give conservative predictions when applied on children population.
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The project was funded by INTERREG IVA and the European Union.
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Ulriksen, L., Dederichs, A.S. (2014). Evacuation of Day Care Centres for Children 0–6 Years: Simulations Using Simulex. In: Weidmann, U., Kirsch, U., Schreckenberg, M. (eds) Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2012. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02447-9_80
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02447-9_80
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