Type of Project: Funded project
Increased Safety for the Disabled

The understanding of human behavior during evacuation processes is an important matter to improve the safety of infrastructures. In many countries, the implementation of performance based codes enables fire safety engineers to use computer based calculation tools to predict and evaluate pedestrian movement and human behavior in buildings. The models are based on experimentally obtained parameters and theoretical models. Pedestrian behavior can be influenced by the characteristics of the buildings (e.g. type of the building) as well as the characteristics of individuals and the pedestrian group.

Today, safety parameters and strategies for safe escape are often based on empirical datasets, which are collected in tests with participants with homogeneous constitutions. Frequently the datasets did not consider elderly persons or persons with disabilities. With respect to the demographic change, the ratio of severely disabled persons is increasing with great age. This raises three questions: 1. Are the existing datasets transferable for the movement of heterogeneous groups? 2. Are they valid for complex behavior? 3. Which effects has an ageing society for the pedestrian and evacuation dynamics?

To be able to design strategies for safe escape for all persons, we will research* the pedestrian behavior of people with physical, mental or age-related disabilities in emergency, depending on their mobility, age and geometrical context. We will improve evacuation concepts and point out methods for education and training.