A new integrated agent-based framework for designing building emergency evacuation: A BIM approach

Abstract

Today, safety control is considered one of the most important pillars of building construction processes due to maintaining security in major incidents such as fire, earthquake, and flood, and placing a basis of mutual trust between builders and residents for building design and construction. The evacuation process is a key aspect of safety control in case of an emergency such as a fire. This study develops a new integrated agent-based framework for designing building emergency evacuation by using Building Information Model (BIM). Three main steps of the framework include data collection, building model development, and evacuation simulation with a combination of Revit-MassMotion. The methodology is demonstrated through its application to a real case of a multi-story commercial building located in Iran. The building model is simulated through three scenarios with a different number of floors (i.e., one, two, and three floors). In each scenario, the safety of evacuation is evaluated for three designs of stairs in the building. The results show the best performance of the building evacuation in all scenarios can be achieved when two individual stairs are designed for each floor. Other influential factors including the maximum density, vision time, and agent count are more acceptable compared to other design factors. These parameters can also be used to design a control system by using smart conceptual models based on both decision tree and auto-work break structure methods.