A comparative study of evacuation strategies for people with disabilities in high-rise building evacuation

► Develop and compare few phased evacuation strategies for people with disabilities. ► Estimate the maximum comfortable structural capacity of the high-rise building. ► Test the usefulness of a vertically phased evacuation strategy with two granularity plans. ► Test the usefulness of a phased evacuation with extra delay to residents with wheelchairs. ► Explore the possibility of using elevators to evacuate residents with wheelchairs. This paper presents new evacuation strategies for a heterogeneous population in high-rise building environments and compares them with traditional simultaneous evacuation strategy. To do so, we first define the maximum comfortable structural capacity of the building as the number of people that can be evacuated without heavy congestion, and estimate it based on flow rate and move frequency ratio. Then we present several evacuation strategies to efficiently evacuate heterogeneous residents at the maximum comfortable structural capacity. The simulation results for a 24-story building suggest several implications for emergency planners. First, we find that a vertically phased evacuation strategy that varies delay times by physical location, is not useful for the simulated building. Second, a phased evacuation strategy that applies a fixed evacuation delay to residents with wheelchairs reduces the aggregated evacuation times, but delaying evacuations of a specific group of individuals may not be ethical or accepted. Finally, evacuation strategies that allows residents with wheelchairs to use elevators are effective, suggesting that emergency administrators should assess whether elevators in their buildings are appropriate for evacuation purposes with appropriate electric controls, electric power, and fire and smoke protection.