Use of Pathfinder in the Study of Occupant Movement in Stairwells

The goal of this paper is to compare empirical egress data to data produced by computer egress models. The empirical egress data presently considered consists of video recordings of unannounced fire drills conducted in several high-rise office buildings. The computer egress modeling data consists of a series of model runs to assess merging for a simple building configuration with one stairwell using the Pathfinder egress modeling software. Similar to the empirical egress data, the Pathfinder results provide an outflow rate for a merging event which is generally less than the sum of the two inflow rates. Quantitatively, the empirical and modeling data are in reasonable agreement.