Study On People’s Evacuation Behavior In High-rise Building Fire

Fire is one of the most often and common threat to public safety and socialdevelopment. With the development of social economy, high-rise buildings step on thestage of history. However, fire in high-rise buildings is a world-class difficult problemendangering the safety of human life and property. To solve the problem of high-risebuilding fire, we should combine prevention with control, namely the combination ofprevention and emergency management. Evacuation is an important part of high-risebuilding fire emergency management. Study on psychology, behavior anddecision-making of the evacuees during the evacuation is the base of studying fireevacuation of high-rise building, has the vital significance.Based on a large amount of literature study and cases analysis, this paper firstlyused the method of case analysis, selecting Shanghai "1115" fire as a typical case,research on psychological characteristics, behavioral characteristics and decisions ofsurvivors. We restore how the survivors escape from the building, describe the behaviorand decision-making of the survivors, and analyze the internal relationship and regularpattern. We find that in a building without fire alarm facilities, people lag to recognizethe fire by themselves and the first reaction of most people is not to escape. Themotivation to escape finally is the threat of fire elements to life. Mobility impairment isa common phenomenon. People don’t tend to use the lift. Pre-evacuation delay isassociated with a variety of factors. There are positive and negative behaviors during theevacuation process, but queuing behavior is not typical.Based on the study of the survivors, we design and hand out questionnaires, focuson everyday users of high-rise building, trying to understand the basic features, workingenvironment, behavior habits, and cognition of behaviors and decisions in the firesituation. We found that high-rise building users usually use the elevator everyday butreject elevator in fire evacuation, lack of experience, commonly have loneliness. Thispaper summarized the features of decisions and its variation tendency in different floorsof high-rise building users in fire, analyzed of related factors that affect high-risebuildings users’ psychological, behavior and decision-making in fire situation, andarrival at conclusions about the daily habits and characteristics will influence thedecision of fire situation. This paper used utility theory, game theory and decision theory building a model tosimulate people’s mutual influence in real fire situations, the distribution of finaldecisions made by people facing options between lift and stair in real fire evacuationsituations, and its variation tendency in different floors. We found some regulations suchas elevator selection rate showed a growth trend with the rise of floors and the variationtendency obviously slowed down compared with the first reaction, elevator selectionrate of each floorusually does not exceed10%in common scene and does not exceed45%in the safe-elevator scene.