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Assessing the Verification and Validation of Building Fire Evacuation Models

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Abstract

To date there is no International standard on the verification and validation (V&V) of building fire evacuation models, i.e., model testers adopt inconsistent procedures or tests designed for other model uses. For instance, the tests presented within the MSC/Circ.1238 Guidelines for evacuation analysis for new and existing passenger ships provided by the International Maritime Organization are often employed for the V&V of models outside their original context of use (building fires instead of maritime applications). This paper presents a list of verification tests for component testing and the analysis of emergent behaviours together with examples of experimental data-sets suitable for the analysis of different core components. The capabilities of building fire evacuation models are evaluated by studying their five main core components, namely (1) pre-evacuation time, (2) movement and navigation, (3) exit usage, (4) route availability and (5) flow constraints. This paper discusses the tests which are included in a freely available Technical Note developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This work is intended to open a discussion on the main issues associated with the definition of a standard procedure for the V&V of building fire evacuation models, including the definition of the acceptance criteria of a standard V&V protocol.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge Jason Averill, Thomas Cleary, Anthony Hamins, and Steve Gwynne for a comprehensive review of the tests presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Fire Safety Engineering, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, SE-22100, Lund, Sweden

    Enrico Ronchi & Daniel Nilsson

  2. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899, USA

    Erica D. Kuligowski, Richard D. Peacock & Paul A. Reneke

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  1. Enrico Ronchi
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  2. Erica D. Kuligowski
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  3. Daniel Nilsson
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  4. Richard D. Peacock
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  5. Paul A. Reneke
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Correspondence to Enrico Ronchi.

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Ronchi, E., Kuligowski, E.D., Nilsson, D. et al. Assessing the Verification and Validation of Building Fire Evacuation Models. Fire Technol 52, 197–219 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-014-0432-3

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