Dynamic building model for interactive hazard and crowd evacuation simulations

As safety sciences become more prominent, BIM-based simulations are attracting greater interest from various domains, from fire engineering to crowd management. The integration of BIM with advanced simulation tools and technologies has significantly advanced the field of hazard and crowd evacuation simulations. By providing detailed, dynamic, and interactive models, BIM enhances the accuracy and effectiveness of emergency planning and response strategies. This paper targets the development of a dynamic building model that can facilitate BIM-based fire protection and evacuation planning and training. In current practice, the building model is input to simulation tools as a static model. The latter provides comprehensive information about the building, but this information is static and represents the building in an idealized state where no changes are happening over time. We propose an ontological multi-model framework by extending the information container for linked document delivery (ICDD) implementation, ISO 21597, to a dynamic multi-model container aiming to explicitly allocate multiple dynamic values to elements in the building model. This enables consideration of changeable building spaces during the simulation runtime and hence real-time interoperability of the interlinked simulation components and modules.