In case of a disaster or an emergency (e.g., earthquake) in a facility, fast evacuation of the occupants is crucial. But the complex indoor environments of buildings (e.g., tall and large commercial buildings) negatively affect evacuation.Moreover, buildings are often threatened by multi-hazard situations, such as post earthquake induced hazards, enforcing the responders and occupants to deal with more than one emergency at a time. To perform effective evacuation, response teams require some information about the damaged building (e.g., building status and contents). In the current practice it is time-consuming to access this information since it is collected at the disaster area. Also, the collected information is incomplete, unstructured and inadequate for an effective indoor navigation. Thus, the required building information is needed to be represented and stored and made available for indoor navigation during emergency. The study explained in this paper proposes an approach which utilizes Building Information Model (BIM) combined with graph theory principles and sensor information to create evacuation paths for the use of responders and occupants during emergency. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) based building models are used and the graph theory elements (e.g., nodes, edges) are defined to generate a graph network model that represents the topological map of the building. This model is integrated with a shortest path algorithm to create safe and short evacuation paths. This paper specifically provides the details on representation of graph theory elements using the building-related information obtained in IFC format, and explains the method used for creating shortest paths
