Agent-Based Evacuation Modeling: Enhancing Building Safety in Emergency Scenarios

Buildings and their supporting infrastructure are vulnerable to both natural and human-made disasters, which pose significant risks to the safety of the occupants. Evacuation models are essential tools for assessing these risks and for ensuring the safety of individuals during emergencies. The primary objective of an evacuation model is to realistically simulate the process by which a large group of people can reach available exits efficiently. This paper introduces an agent-based evacuation model that represents the environment as a rectangular grid, where individuals, obstacles, and exits interact dynamically. The model employs only five rules to simulate evacuation dynamics while also accounting for complex factors such as movement and stagnation. Different from many evacuation models, this approach includes rules that account for common behaviors exhibited in stressful evacuation situations such as accidents, hysteria, and disorientation. By incorporating these behavioral conditions, the model more accurately reflects the real-life reactions of individuals during evacuation, leading to more realistic and applicable results. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, comprehensive experiments and case studies are conducted in diverse urban settings. The results of these experiments demonstrate that the model offers valuable insights into the evacuation process and provides a more precise assessment of its behavior in emergency scenarios.