A Multi-Grid Model for Evacuation Coupling With the Effects of Fire Products

The effects of fire products on pedestrians are introduced into a multigrid evacuation model, in which the space is discretized into smaller grids with the size of 0.1 m × 0.1 m and each pedestrian occupies 5×5 grid sites. The effects of fire products on pedestrians consist of two parts: the desired movement direction and the step frequency. The data of fire products obtained from the simulation results of a well-founded computational fluid dynamic (CFD) program, the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). With the multi-grid model, we investigated the walk routes of pedestrians in fires, and the evacuation time in scenarios with different fire intensities, pre-movement times or door widths.