Can information sharing among evacuees improve indoor emergency evacuation? An exploration study based on BIM and agent-based simulation

Abstract

With the progress of building construction technology, indoor space of building is becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, which leads to the deficiency for interior personnel to understand the indoor layout for evacuation purposes. While sensor-based methods of indoor environment perception and road network updating have been proposed, the role of evacuees in emergency evacuation environment as information sources to perceive and share relevant information has been ignored. Therefore, this paper first explores the feasibility of a BIM and multi-agent-based information sharing framework to update the geometric network model for evacuation navigation according to the dynamic environment, building a system that can update the indoor network model extracted from BIM and realize dynamic emergency evacuation navigation through information sharing among evacuees. Then, emergency evacuation simulation is carried out based on the information sharing mechanism to explore the influence of relevant factors of information sharing on indoor emergency evacuation. The simulation results show that even incomplete information sharing of evacuees can still improve evacuation navigation, and the overall evacuation performance of evacuees is improved even if not all the evacuee shared information.