Recent advances in the study of fire spread and behavior of building materials under fire have helped designers to set minimum standards for both structural and finishing materials for different types of building occupancies. However, when a fire breaks out in a building, the immediate hazard is to the occupants, yet there are no precisely defined ways of designing adequate means of escape. It is hypothesized that this apparent lack of research in this direction is due in part to the differences in the design of buildings as a result of unique site conditions or the building configuration itself. Coupled with this uniqueness of design is the tendency of humans to panic when an emergency arises leading to unpredictable actions. Given that deterministic models are not capable of handling such unpredictable behavior, designs based purely on the intuition of the designer can lead to very disastrous results in case of an emergency. Two methodologies for the design and evaluation of building facilities and regional emergency evacuation plans have been proposed. A building plan provided by the decision maker is translated into a mathematical format useful for analysis. The analysis is performed and the feasible alternatives given to the designer or decision maker. The methodologies were tested on several examples including evacuation of a medical facility which was used as a case study. Both methodologies for routing and resource allocation efficiently solved the problem, thus aiding the designer in identifying critical parameters. Finally the dissertation proposes future work for the Emergency Evacuation Problem. This work includes incorporating the models that were developed here in a decision support environment. This enhancement would improve the decision making process as it would enable the designer to interactively test various design strategies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8749 |
| Date | 01 January 1993 |
| Creators | Bakuli, David Luvisia |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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