Welcome

to the Department of Computer Simulation for Fire Safety and Pedestrian Traffic!

Objective of our work is to understand the complex dynamics of pedestrian flows in order to increase safety both in buildings and at mass gatherings. For this purpose we deal with planning and optimization of escape routes as well as the basic principles of pedestrian dynamics. Our research covers the entire scope in this area including large scale experiments, modelling and computer simulations.

A second focus is the modelling and simulation of fire and smoke dynamics. CFD codes such as the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) or OpenFOAM as well as the two-zone fire model CFAST are used for that purpose.

In a close cooperation with the Institute for Advanced Simulation at the Research Centre Jülich we use supercomputers for applications in civil engineering. Thanks to this collaboration other departments also have access to state-of-the-art parallel computing resources for numerical methods and other application-oriented simulations.