A Sensitivity Analysis of a Hospital in Case of Fire

One of the primary objectives of fire safety is to guarantee the evacuation of all the occupants from a building safely. Although fire safety rules and regulations exist, they remain insufficient to guarantee the safety of all building occupants and do not prevent the dramatic events to be repeated. Especially in health care facilities, e.g. hospitals, care homes, etc., the evacuation procedure is more complex than in an ordinary building. This is due to multiple reasons such as the large number of patients requiring assistance to evacuate or the time required to prepare patients for assisted evacuation. Traditionally, hospitals focused on horizontal evacuation. Patients should initially be moved from areas of risk to safe areas. Furthermore, staff to occupant ratio may be low, especially at night, limiting the ability to instigate a rapid staff response and evacuation of occupants.

Considering the limited number of studies on assisted evacuations, this work aims to provide a deeper insight on the modeling issues to simulate such an event. Based upon a preliminary risk analysis using the Fire Risk Assessment Method for Engineering (FRAME), the most critical floor will be selected and modeled using Pathfinder, an agent-based evacuation model. Furthermore, the impact of different percentage of People with Reduced Mobility will be investigated. Moreover, since the number of staff may significantly vary in the same scenarios (e.g. during the night), different ratios of staff to occupant’s will be studied to show the impact of this parameter on the evacuation process.