Developing an Adaptive Building Evacuation Simulation and Decision Support Framework using Cognitive Agent-Based Modelling

Preparing for an unprecedented event involving the movement of populations could take up large amounts of resources if done conventionally. The main motivation of this study is the behavioural modification approach which is an underexplored potential in evacuation dynamics, offering new possibilities in terms of practicality and ease of implementation. This paper tackles an adaptive building evacuation simulation and decision support framework that will serve as a guide to evaluate and propose evacuation strategies for disaster management researchers and decision-making authorities. The framework mainly involves the formulation of the cognitive agent model, the evacuation simulation, and the decision support. The timeliness in the Philippine context of the long-overdue “Big One” earthquake, the vulnerability of the case study, and the capability of the framework to be a standard guide where components can be customized by users based on the disaster type and site-specific requirements make this research a significant undertaking

An agent-based simulation model for emergency egress

Unfortunately, news regarding tragedies involving crowd evacuations are becoming more and more common. Understanding disasters and crowd emergency evacuation behaviour is essential to define effective evacuation protocols. This paper proposes an agent-based model of egress behaviour consisting of three complementary models: (i) model of people moving in a building in normal circumstances, (ii) policies of egress evacuation, and (iii) social models for integrating models (e.g. affiliation) that explain the social behaviour and help in mass evacuations. The proposed egress model has been evaluated in a university building and the results show how these models can help to better understand egress behaviour and apply this knowledge for improving the design and execution evacuation plans