Abstract
Purpose This study deals with the fire escape problem in the building but final aim of this research is to select planning variables which decide the safety of visitors from the standpoint of building design and to propose effective countermeasures to each building according to its characteristics. Object building As an object building for this research, we take a multi-story department store which stands in the city. Because it's a sort of semi-public facilities and a lot of people stay there at a time. And it's difficult to guarantee sufficient fire defense only by the restrictions of current building code, and dangerous situations can be easily anticipated when the occured a fire. Method We used computer simulation for the analysis and made a model that can trace time series state transition of both visitors' escape and the spread of smoke at the same time. In the simulation, the occupants decide the route to escape through probabilistic processing and when they choose the staircase and the way to it, they take the distance and the congestion into consideration, and those who can get out of the floor are all to proceed to the first floor. In the case of smoke flowing, the escape behavior is to be modified accordingly. The safety of visitor is judged by the smoke suffocation time in the floor and the density of congestion in the staircase, in which secondary accidents are apt to happen because of the much crowds caused by the simultaneous escape.
