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     Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology


Study on Applicability of FDS+Evac for Evacuation Modeling in Case of Road Tunnel Fire

Jan Glasa and Lukas Valasek
Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dubravska Cesta 9, 84507 Bratislava, Slovakia
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology  2014  17:3603-3615
http://dx.doi.org/10.19026/rjaset.7.713  |  © The Author(s) 2014
Received: November 13, 2013  |  Accepted: November 28, 2013  |  Published: May 05, 2014

Abstract

In this study, fire in a short 2-lane single-directional road tunnel with two different traffic situations is considered and the impact of spread of fire and smoke on people evacuation is investigated. The FDS+Evac system used comprises of FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator), an advanced CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) fire field model supplemented by agent-based FDS evacuation model, Evac. Evac is capable to exploit its direct access to simulated fire characteristics and to model the influence of fire on evacuees’ behavior and decision making. In Evac, a modified Helbing’s social force model adapted for description of movement of evacuees and their behavior is implemented. Some particularities of FDS+Evac, which must be taken into account to avoid misrepresentation of inputs for evacuation in case of fire, are discussed and the impact of occurrence of higher capacity vehicles on people evacuation is illustrated. Simulation results and some of comments and recommendations included can be useful for those who are engaged in research, development, testing and competent use of FDS+Evac for practical problems of fire safety in road tunnels.

Keywords:

Agent-based, evacuation modeling, FDS+Evac, fire simulation, road tunnel,


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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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The authors have no competing interests.

ISSN (Online):  2040-7467
ISSN (Print):   2040-7459
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