ABSTRACT
Emergency evacuation is one of the topics considered within the permanent and active awareness on safety by designers, operators and authorities dealing with airworthiness. Airplane manufacturers are obliged to carry out evacuation tests under specified conditions during the certification process, but due to the risk of personal injury and the cost of full scale trials, computer-based simulation models are being developed. The present work is a first step in the setting up of one of such models, and describes an efficient procedure for cabin data collection and an algorithm to assign seats to available exits. The questions addressed include: the effect of number, type and location of available exits in the overall behavior; the relationship between size of exit and occupant flow rate; and seat-to-exit distance distributions in normal and extreme cases. Results show that long narrow body airplanes exhibit the worst conditions; moreover, very bad situations appear when there are two or more exits very close to each other; and longitudinally uneven location of exits as well as lack of left to right symmetry in a cabin result in enhanced difficulties for evacuation.
