The use of elevators in the evacuation of high-rise buildings

Abstract

The paper substantiates the possibility of using the elevators as the main evacuation path from high-rise multi-storey buildings. The analysis of the reasons preventing effective evacuation of people from high-rise buildings is carried out. A tall multi-storey office building was modeled in the Pathfinder software package. Several scenarios of the human flow are presented, and the influence of time parameters (the beginning of evacuation and delay of signal delivery), the composition of the flow (different ratios of people of different mobility groups), and the level at which the evacuation of each group begins are reflected on the time of evacuation using elevators. The time of evacuation by a staircase is compared with the time of evacuation using elevators. It is shown that it is effective to use evacuation elevators in 60-storey buildings, but it is not rational to use them for a 20-storey building.