This paper describes a simulation of fire in a luxury fashion shop and its evacuation plan. According to the prescriptive rules, the shop doesn’t comply with the safety required level for people. Therefore the performance based approach is used in order to foresee and then evaluate compensatory measures.
We used a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model, the FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) software, version 6, developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA. FDS also contains an evacuation module, Evac. FDS+Evac is a model which simulates fire and its impact on the course of evacuation and behavior of evacuees.
Compensatory measures adopted in the fashion shop are: forced extraction system, fire detection system, automatic low pressure water mist extinguishing system and smoke curtains. All of these are taken into account in the simulation. The performance based approach demonstrates that the compensatory measures allow to achieve a suitable safety level.