Evacuation Times in Natural Disasters: Pathfinder Simulation

Abstract

Fires in Turkey cause loss of life and property. When this situation is reflected in the news, it creates a negative image for Turkish tourism. It is not possible to conduct drills while customers are staying in hotels. Existing literature indicates that the Pathfinder program produces results with almost 100% accuracy for the optimization of evacuation processes in public areas (theatres, mosques, etc.). For this reason, the Pathfinder application was preferred in the research. This study was carried out using the Pathfinder application, considering the natural disasters in our country. The aim of the research is to calculate the evacuation processes in disaster situations in hotel architecture plans and to suggest new scenarios. According to the findings obtained, while the evacuation times increase as the number of rooms increases, the extent to which architectural planning increases this evacuation is discussed through figures. For this reason, single, double and triple rooms are drawn randomly, customer evacuation times are evaluated by adding rooms side by side and escape ramps in between, and the current situation is addressed through hotel architecture. As a result, the more hotel rooms there are, the more commercial income is generated, but it has been observed that guest evacuation times are reduced by adding escape ramps by sacrificing rooms. It is thought that this should be taken into consideration in the design of hotel architecture.