ASSESSMENT OF EMERGENCY ESCAPE ROUTES FOR A BUILDING USING PATHFINDER - A CASE STUDY

Evacuation planning is critical for important applications to evacuate affected populations to safer places in the event of natural disasters, fire, industrial and constructional accidents. Currently, evacuation plans are often hand - crafted using table - top exercises and these methods time consuming and labour intensive as well as expensive limiting the number of scenar ios during planning and adjustments to unanticipated events during emergency response. Computerized tools help to resolve the issues in least possible time and can be applied in complex scenarios. In addition, the tools recommend novel escape routes and as sist with alternative strategies. The tool adopted in the current study is pathfinder software. To expose the principle, the graphical representation is applied to the optimization of building evacuation. The main purpose of the study is to perform an anal ysis of the factors determining the architectural configuration of buildings for the mobility of people and finding out the shortest distance for an effective evacuation.