Validation of a Pedestrian Simulation Tool Using the NIST Stairwell Evacuation Data

Researchers at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) collected occupant egress data in the stairwells of several high-rise buildings for potential use in quantitative and qualitative validation of evacuation simulation tools (Kuligowski and Peacock (2010)). We found this data suitable for establishing occupant initial locations, pre-evacuation time distributions, and other parametric inputs for our simulation code (PEDFLOW). With this data set, we were able to validate several core behavioral components of PEDFLOW by directly comparing actual versus predicted values for occupant speed on stairs and building total evacuation times. This paper summarizes our work on the stairwell data sets, highlighting the methodology behind the extraction of values for the parametric inputs, and demonstrating the results obtained for one specific 10-story high-rise building data-set.