1st SFPE Eruopean Conference - Copenhagen 2015

Back home from an amazing conference. It was not easy to organize such a big and high quality conference, congratulations must go to the organizers. Almost 200 people coming from many different countries in Europe and Overseas discussing the present and the future of the Fire Protection/Safety Engineering. I presented a study that was done by Maikol Alonso (University of Colombia) for his master thesis in the Comillas University here in Madrid. I was his tutor for this work and I was very proud to defend it in front of such a great knowledgeable audience.

Now it’s time to focus again on the project and get new – more accurate – results. I am sure more people will participate on this. At the end, the only thing we want is to evolve on the subject and be useful for the entire Fire Engineering community. I have also the chance to personally congratulate Bryan Klein for the great job ThunderheadEngineering have done in the last Pathfinder release.

With the Occupant Contours option, it’s now possible to track these output in real time:

• Density, 
• Level of Service, 
• Speed, 
• Normalized Speed, 
• Usage [Instantaneous], 
• Usage [Accumulated], 
• Time to Exit, 
• Average, 
• Maximum, 
• Integrate

This was something really missing before in Pathfinder and with this new feature, it’s reaching the top of the list of the evacuation modelling software without any doubts. The main algorithm has also been improved, especially in the interaction between agents, doors and exits, i.e. in determining the evacuation roots.

Some images below show the new features:

Density map

Velocity map

Level of service (stairs)

Level of service (corridor)

Exit time

Use