The specifications in fire protection in Germany are very strict, and the rules and specifications are correspondingly extensive. The need for this has been demonstrated time and again - from the fire at Düsseldorf Airport in the 1990s to the Grenfell Tower accident. In addition to the requirements of the state-specific building codes, more and more standards are being developed to provide proof of protection.

The aim of standardization within the framework of a DIN is to ensure that minimum technical requirements are met and comparable. For fire protection, DIN 18009 summarizes fire protection engineering methods as generally accepted rules of technology. Here, it is standardized how alternative proofs for the fire protection proof can be provided, e.g. the comparison between the necessary and the maximum available evacuation time (RSET vs. ASET) or the procedure for the proof of fire resistance duration of building components.

The standard is now extended by a second part on evacuation calculations and defines the procedure for a performance-based verification: Based on the problem, relevant evacuation scenarios are defined and the relevant protection targets are specified. These are evaluated against agreed performance criteria. The most common criteria include clearance time and analysis of congestion, e.g., congestion time or congestion size.

Depending on which performance criteria need to be evaluated, different models of evacuation calculation are recommended. A distinction is made between pedestrian flow simulations, flow models or hand calculation methods. Microscopic, space-continuous models, such as our crowd:it software, are the most informative, as they fulfill all requirements for the evaluation and visualization of evacuation scenarios.

The procedure is as follows: the protection goals and their specific criteria are determined; ideally, these are defined together with the examining authority. The evacuation calculations are analyzed and evaluated with regard to these criteria (see What for evacuation simulations). If the protection goals and their performance criteria are met, the planning can be released. If this is not the case, the planning must be revised and the analysis performed again. This can ensure that all persons can leave the building in a desired time.

Figure 1: Options for ensuring fire protection – Based on: FIRE PROTECTION ENGINEERING METHODS – PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF DIN 18009, Georg Spennes, BFT Cognos GmbH, Aachen, FeuerTRUTZ Fire Protection Congress 2018

In der RiMEA guideline for microscopic evacuation analyses, evacuation simulations are described as follows:

"Computer-aided analysis of autonomous person movements towards the safe location, where each agent (person modeled in the computer) performs individual movements based on individual parameters, capabilities and/or behavioral settings based on computer-aided algorithms.

NOTE: In contrast to flow computations (e.g., Predtetschenski & Milinski), which treat person flows as fluid flows (= macroscopic), microscopic escape analysis represents the movement of each individual person. Thereby, each person has individual properties that characterize their behavior. Microscopic escape analysis provides information on total escape time as well as locations and times of jams."