A Study Regarding the Human Evacuation from a Hotel in Case of a Fire Drill

The aim of this paper is to analyze the human evacuation from a building designed for tourism—a hotel by means of engineering techniques to approach the fire safety problem—by performing a numerical simulation of the human behaviour in case of emergencies. This case study assumes that the hotel is fully booked (about 50 clients) and the evacuation drill is performed during the night, when the clients are confused and sleepy. The numerical simulation of the fire drill is performed using Pathfinder software (emergency egress simulator), which can model group behaviour (it is considered that every room is occupied by the same family members or friends and during the evacuation process they stay together). An important aspect of this paper is the pre-movement time and the way of modelling the behaviour for sleepy and confused persons. Considering the simple geometry of the building, the short evacuation paths and the reduced number of clients, the total evacuation time is admissible and it can be concluded that the building is well designed.