Reliability Analysis of Occupant Safety Evacuation in Public Assembly Occupancies

The evaluation of the failure probability and safety level of occupant evacuation is of extreme importance. The safety level of occupant evacuation is expressed by the margin of escape time. Three traditional methods for solving the reliability index are introduced and an optimization method is proposed in this study. Comparisons between the optimization method and the traditional methods are carried out. Since occupant evacuation is affected by various random parameters, it is necessary to analyze the importance of each variable in comparison with the others in occupant safety evacuation. A methodology is presented to classify the significant and insignificant random variables using sensitivity analysis. Finally, the successful application in a case study suggests that these methodologies are suitable and reliable for the reliability analysis of occupant safety evacuation in public assembly occupancies.