This thesis closely examines the Slovenian legislation with regard to fire protection, fire safety requirements in buildings and the planning of evacuation routes. In the introduction, it elaborates on the basic definitions of the term evacuation, the history of the development of evacuation planning, the methods of contemporary planning and the data that must be collected during the planning stage itself. Following the technical guidelines for the construction of TSG-1-001:2019 and the Fire Protection Act with its by-laws on evacuation routes, I designed various room plans and their corresponding evacuation scenarios. I designed the plans for three basic room types: a classroom, a library and a corridor. I added multiple objects and pieces of equipment to each of the rooms in such a way that they coincided with the purpose of the room while also representing obstacles on the evacuation route. I made two-dimensional plans in AutoCAD and exported them to the Pyrosim program, where a third dimension was added to them. I then exported these models to the Pathfinder program, where people with different movement speeds were added to the rooms. An evacuation simulation was subsequently carried out which provided the results or evacuation times which have been presented in the form of graphs and tables.
This master’s thesis discusses how the evacuation time is influenced by obstacles and the orientation of their placement on evacuation routes, the width and length of the evacuation route, the number of people, their speed of movement and workload, the number of exits in the room. The thesis proposes five hypotheses. Based on the results of the experimental part of the thesis, four hypotheses were refuted an one was partially confirmed. Based on the results, I found that increasing the width of the evacuation route from 1.2 m to 2.0 m reduces the evacuation time by 8 %, that the evacuation time is, at most, 1.75-times longer when extending the evacuation route from 20 m to 40 m, and that a perpendicular placement of objects on the evacuation route increases the evacuation time by 4 seconds compared to a parallel placement. I also found that when we have two emergency exits at selected locations as opposed to one, the evacuation time is cut by more than half in one scenario and less than half in the other scenarios, and that the evacuation time increases up to 1.33 times when there are 20 people in the room compared to 10 people.
The findings of this thesis could contribute to evacuations research, to the planning and placement of objects and the design of evacuation routes.
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