Agent-based evacuation model of large public buildings under fire conditions (original) (raw)

Modeling and Simulation of Fire Evacuation in Public Buildings

The negative consequence of fire, especially fire in public buildings, brings too much of lost in both human and money. The fire evacuation specialists proposed many evacuate techniques, methods and policies adapting to the given building, groups of people, or situations. However, conducting experiments to test these proposed solutions, in the reality, is nearly impossible. Therefore, simulation of fire and fire evacuation to evaluate these proposals is a reasonable solution. This paper proposes an agent-based model for modeling and simulation of fire evacuation in public buildings. The model is implemented and tested using the GAMA agent-based simulation platform.

Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation for evacuation of people from a building in case of fire

Procedia Computer Science, 2018

The evacuation of people from a building on fire is a task which can prove to be very difficult, in particular because of the influence of human behavior, but also of the type of people or the evacuation place configuration. Thus, it is crucial to think on how to organize the evacuation upstream for a situation of emergency can give rise disorganization, on one hand because of panic which grips evacuees, and on the other end because of the large quantity of evacuees in dangerous conditions. These recent years, several fire evacuation models have been proposed. Unfortunately, most of these models do not clearly define the parameters to be considered for their effective evaluations. These models consider, more generally, the number of survivors as a key parameter of evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent Agent-Based Model enabling the modelling and simulation of evacuation of people from a building on fire. Our proposed model is based on four parameters that allow her practical evaluation. A case study of simulation is carried out in a building having the general configuration of Kinshasa supermarkets. This model is general enough for it to be implemented in several types of commercial buildings without major changes.

Fire Evacuation Simulation Considering the Movement of Pedestrian According to Fire Spread

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2018

A fire simulator and an evacuation simulator are generally used independently to diagnose the safety of a building in the case of the fire and evacuation. However, it is hard to provide highly accurate safety diagnosis with this method because it does not reflect the movement of pedestrians in the situation of a fire. Therefore, this study proposed a fire evacuation simulation technique that can describe the movement of pedestrians with considering the fire spread. The proposed simulation technique applies the fire spread data of the fire dynamics simulator (FDS) to the floor field model (FFM) and it models that pedestrians recognizes the fire and take a detour to a safe route. This study proposed a method to link the data between FDS and FFM and an improved FFM considering fire spread. Additionally, the proposed method was applied to a real building on a university campus. This study simulated evacuations under various scenarios. Simulation results showed that the number of evacuees escaping through each exit varied by the presence of fire. Moreover, it was found that the evacuation time was increased or decreased by the fire and bottleneck phenomenon was also worsened under fire situation.

FDS+Evac: An Agent Based Fire Evacuation Model

Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2008, 2009

In this paper, an evacuation simulation method is presented, which is embedded in a CFD based fire modelling programme. The evacuation programme allows the modelling of high crowd density situations and the interaction between evacuation simulations and state-of-the-art fire simulations. The evacuation process is modelled as a quasi-2D system, where autonomous agents simulating the escaping humans are moving according to equations of motion and decision making processes. The space and time, where the agents are moving, is taken to be continuous, but the building geometry is discretized using fine meshes. The model follows each agent individually and each agent has its own personal properties, like mass, walking velocity, familiar doors, etc. The fire and evacuation calculations interact via the smoke and gas concentrations. A reaction function model is used to select the exit routes. The model is compared to other evacuation simulation models using some test simulations.

Modelling and numerical simulation of pedestrian flow evacuation from a multi-storey historical building in the event of fire applying safety engineering tools

Journal of Cultural Heritage, 2019

Fire prevention in museums is a much more complex matter because the safeguarding of human life must be integrated both with the protection of the cultural heritage of buildings and the unrepeatability of the works of art exhibited. While most fires cannot be prevented, implementing complementary safety measures can help both to mitigate the negative impacts and limit costs. This is an issue that researchers have little investigated over time and thus very few studies are available in the literature. The paper shows the results of fire simulation and visitors' evacuation processes from one-exit multi-storey historical building, which is used prevalently as a museum, equipped additionally with a non-invasive supplementary countermeasure based on an automatic people entry flow control system in the hall of the building. For achieving the purpose of our research, an extension of the analysis tools generally applied in the field of engineering was made. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling showed that for all fire scenarios investigated the gradual spread of combustion gases and smoke is influenced by fire size, building geometry, and chimney effect along the ceiling and the stairwell. The very high temperatures that could endanger the building structure and lining occurred only in the fire room. Evacuation simulations showed the effectiveness of the current fire safety plan and equipment to manage fire emergencies, and suggested including in security procedures staff alert and guidance for a quick evacuation of visitors. People entry flow micro-simulation proved that the implementation of a control system, which counted both the number of visitors and those leaving the museum in the same time and stopped temporarily the passages through the entrance, prevented the possibility of having an overcrowded museum for the safety of occupants in the event of fire.

Modeling of Emergency Evacuation in Building Fire

The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2020

One of the main problems of rescue workers in confrontation of fired complex buildings is the lack of sufficient information about the building indoor environment and their emergency exit ways. Building information modeling (BIM) is a database for building a 3D model of building information to create a 3D building geometry network model. This paper has implemented some GIS and BIM integration analyses to determine the shortest and safest paths to people under fire risk and simulate their movement in the building. Plasco building was a multi-story shop in Tehran which has been fired in 2017 and destroyed. This paper attempts to simulate the firefighting and rescue operations in Plasco Building using an integration of BIM and GIS. There is no detailed information about the building and the fire incident, therefore the developed BIM and corresponding geometric network might differ slightly. The shortest and safest paths to the exit door or windows where the fire ladders are located are computed and analyzed. As a result of 15 scenarios developed in this paper, it was found that at 87% of the cases, the safest paths for the emergency exit of the people at risk were longer than the shortest paths. This study has evaluated different scenarios for the shortest and safest paths using Dijkstra algorithm considering different origins and destination points in the 3D indoor environment to assist the rescue operations.

Simulation and Modelling the Human Crowd Evacuation

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering

The operational research (OR) become one of emerging areas and significance and its relevance to be used in the simulation and modelling. To simulating and modelling the crowd evacuation, the most important elements to have in a realistic model is the appropriate simulation technique. To simulate the evacuee's movement in crowd is still in research and challenge because of the emergence and become a complex task and dangerous for the real and actual case. The computational simulation technique is required in order to model the crowd evacuation as one part of OR and become a solution to represent the fire crowd evacuation in the closed space e.g. Building relates to human movement and its states. The theories and concept of computational method allows for creating, analysing and experimentation. The techniques; Agent-Based Simulation (ABS), Social Force Model (SFM) and the hybrid SFM/ABS has been proposed for this research work. SFM is the well-known and popular technique for crowd evacuation while ABS is best-known, intelligent and appropriate to imitate the human movement. This paper provides a review of this research work from an OR perspective and the outcomes of a review of the computational simulation techniques literature are presented, using a proposed conceptual model will be valuable for future researchers, and modellers alike.

Large Event Halls Evacuation Using an Agent-Based Modeling Approach

IEEE Access

The paper explores the usage of agent-based modeling in the context of large event halls evacuation during music festivals and cultural events. An agent-based model is created in NetLogo 6.2.2 for better representing the human behavior when involved in such situations. A series of characteristics have been set for the agents in order to preserve their heterogeneity in terms of speed, age, locomotion impairment, familiarity with the environment, evacuating with another person, choosing the closest exit or not, selecting the closest path to the exits. An ''adapted cone exit'' approach has been proposed in the paper in order to facilitate the guidance of the agents in the agent-based model to the closest exit and its advantages have been proved in comparison with the classical ''cone exit'' approach. Different evacuation scenarios have been simulated and analyzed for better observing the capabilities of evacuation modeling in the case of evacuation emergencies. Besides the overall evacuation time, an average evacuation time has been determined for the agents based on the individual evacuation time, which can be easily connected with a risk indicator associated to each situation. Due to the visual interface offered by the agent-based model, coupled with the evacuation indicators, the proposed model can allow the identification of the main factors that may contribute to a prolonged evacuation process (e.g. overcrowding at one of the exits, not choosing the appropriate door, evacuating with a friend/parent) and the potential measures to be considered for insuring a safe evacuation process. INDEX TERMS Agent-based modeling, large event halls, evacuation process, simulation.

A Simulation Model for Pedestrian Crowd Evacuation Based on Various AI Techniques

Revue d'Intelligence Artificielle

This paper attempts to design an intelligent simulation model for pedestrian crowd evacuation. For this purpose, the cellular automata (CA) was fully integrated with fuzzy logic, the kth nearest neighbors (KNN), and some statistical equations. In this model, each pedestrian was assigned a specific speed, according to his/her physical, biological and emotional features. The emergency behavior and evacuation efficiency of each pedestrian were evaluated by coupling his/her speed with various elements, such as environment, pedestrian distribution and familiarity with the exits. These elements all have great impacts on the evacuation process. Several experiments were carried out to verify the performance of the model in different emergency scenarios. The results show that the proposed model can predict the evacuation time and emergency behavior in various types of building interiors and pedestrian distributions. The research provides a good reference to the design of building evacuation systems.

Fire Emergency Evacuation Simulation of a shopping mall using Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS)

Journal of Chemical Engineering

Fire accident in a shopping mall, garments factory and other labor intensive industries nowadays has become a common incident in Bangladesh and poses a great threat to life, facilities and economy of our country. In this work, fire and evacuation simulation was performed for a single stored shopping complex utilizing computational fluid dynamic techniques. Fire Dynamic Simulator with evacuation (FDS+Evac) software was used to simulate a shopping mall fire and study the effects of fire on the emergency egress process of people. The shopping mall of area 64 m 2 comprises of seven rooms with a pool fire at the center of the mall is modeled for simulation. The total evacuation time (TET) for a fixed population density were estimated with the change of heat release rate, soot yield, soot density and the design pattern or geometry of shopping mall. The evacuation of agents in different time and different design pattern of the mall has been assessed using the data obtained from the simulation. FDS+Evac provides an integrating platform where the interaction between fire growth and evacuees can be taken into account by simultaneous simulation allowing a full coupling of the fire conditions and human behavior. This makes FDS is an effective tool for simulating large and high density crowds where the movement dynamics of evacuees is affected by the crowd pressure. Full scale fire experiment is often quite difficult to study the fine and crowds evacuation behavior. This paper illustrates a promising application of fire dynamic simulator (FDS+Evac) for fire and evacuation modeling to predict the total evacuation time.