Towards a smart elevator-aided fire evacuation scheme in high-rise apartment buildings for elderly

Staircase evacuation is the major means of fire evacuation for current high-rise residential buildings. However, its feasibility may be questioned as more and more senior citizens live there in the future. The weakness in physical strength and mobility impairment of elderly people may impede the successful implementation of staircase evacuation. It is therefore reasonable to consider using elevators for overall evacuation in high-rise residential buildings. However, enhancing the fire protection of elevators and efficiently controlling the elevator-aided evacuation operations are two major difficulties for applying elevators in building fire evacuation. Recently, the use of smart control for building facility management has become a hot issue in built environment studies. An enabling solution for smart elevator-aided building fire evacuation (SEABFE) is proposed in this article. The solution supports the SEABFE by determining the safer and more efficient elevator-aided evacuation strategy based on real-time fire ground and evacuation progress on the scene. A simulated case study of fire evacuation in a typical high-rise residential building shows that the proposed SEABFE can be successfully performed. Apart from keeping the elevator operation safe, the planned elevator-aided evacuation strategy may save 38.0% of the time compared with the strategy using only staircases in the scene.