A Basic Study on the Evacuation Characteristics of High-Rise Building through Comparing Evacuation Experiment and Simulations - A Case Study in Korea

Large scale and high-rise buildings are often built because of functional, economical, or aesthetic needs, especially in metropolises. As buildings get larger and taller, traffic volume and time for evacuation increase when incidents occur. To ensure the safety of occupants in those buildings, a proper evaluation of the occupants' evacuation is often achieved through simulations. However, the defined input parameters of the currently available evacuation simulation systems rarely consider the occupant differences among countries or races, which may impair the accuracy of the evacuation simulation if the simulation tool is used on another ethnic group. The objective of this paper is to obtain basic parameters required for an accurate evacuation simulation that targets the Korean population through real-world experiments. In this study, the authors conducted a mock evacuation experiment with 60 people in a 50-story apartment building located in Daegu, Korea. The occupants' change of walking speed and behavior that occurred in the evacuation staircases was analyzed through a CCTV that recorded time and passage on each staircase. Both the horizontal and vertical walking speeds at stairs were obtained. The simulation system was examined through comparing the actual evacuation time of the experiment with the evacuation time of simulation. The paper contributes to the overall body of knowledge by providing insights into the basic parameters that the simulation systems need to take into account to enable a better evaluation of evacuation time that matches the Korean population.