A BIM-Enhanced Approach to Evacuation Planning in University Environments for Optimizing Safety

In an era of dynamic challenges, ensuring safety in large public spaces is crucial. The spatial layout and arrangement of obstacles in the built environment significantly impact evacuation performance. This research explores crafting evacuation plans and egress strategies, focusing on how spatial layouts and obstacles impact performance, with an emphasis on the complex environment of university campuses. This goal can be achieved by utilizing BIM, which serves as a persuasive resolution to the aforementioned challenges, thereby improving the evacuation planning procedure and significantly enhancing pedestrian safety. The BIM model focuses on providing comprehensive information about all possible evacuation routes accessible to every individual within the structure, guiding them along the most efficient trajectories using A*-algorithm. To evaluate the efficiency of this approach, the study utilizes a university building with some modifications as a case study. Two trials were carried out by changing the location of the hazard. The findings reveal that the first trial took 3 seconds to map all evacuation routes on the floor. After repositioning the hazard in the second trial, the model only took 2.2 seconds. Comparing the proposed path with the traditional route showed significant improvements in both distance and evacuation time. In the first trial, the proposed path proved to be 19.7 meters shorter and 15 seconds faster than the traditional route, reducing the original evacuation time by 21.5%. The second trial delivered even more impressive results, with a 20-meter decrease in distance and a 15.4-second improvement, achieving an 18.92% reduction in the evacuation time.