EMERGENCY EVACUATION ANALYSIS OF PASAR PRAWIROTAMAN, YOGYAKARTA USING PATHFINDER SIMULATION

Abstract

Multi-story public markets pose distinctive challenges for emergency evacuation owing to their fluctuating crowd densities, diverse users, and complex vertical layouts. This study evaluates whether the evacuation performance of Pasar Prawirotaman, a revitalized public market in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, satisfies life-safety requirements under different occupancy conditions. The market spans six levels from a basement to an open rooftop and relies on four corner staircases for emergency egress, because its elevator and escalators must be shut down during a fire; its predominantly older trader population also moves and reacts more slowly than a general retail population. Pathfinder agent-based simulation modelled occupant movement at three occupancy levels, low, normal, and peak, and the Required Safe Egress Time (RSET) was compared against a conservative literature-based Available Safe Egress Time (ASET) benchmark of 300 seconds. Movement-based egress times were 152, 232, and 272 seconds. The safety factor fell from 1.97 at low occupancy, which meets the target of 1.5, to 1.29 at normal and 1.10 at peak occupancy, both of which fail it; the building therefore does not satisfy the ASET > RSET criterion with an adequate margin under ordinary and crowded conditions. Occupants converged on a single staircase and a single exit instead of spreading across the four available stairs, and individual congestion rose almost fourfold as the crowd grew. Adding a staircase adjacent to the primary exit reduced RSET by seven to eleven percent, whereas the same stair placed away from any exit produced no improvement. Egress performance is therefore governed by the position of vertical access rather than by the number of stairs.