LAUSR

In most situations, staircase is the only egress to evacuate from high-rise buildings. The merging flow on the stair landing has a great influence on the evacuation efficiency. This paper developed an improved cellular automaton model to describe the merging behavior and the model is validated by a series of real experiments. It is found that the flow rate of simulation results are similar to the drills, which means the improved model is resonable and can be used to describe the merging hehavior on stairs. Furthermore, some scenarios with different door location and building floor number are simulated by the model. Results show that 1) the best door location is next to the upward staircase; 2) the total evacuation time and the building floor number are linear and 3) the pedestrians on upper floors have a negative influence on the evacuation flow rate.