Agent-Based Simulation of Spatial Cognition and Wayfinding in Building Fire Emergency Evacuation

There is a need to understand how people and environment react in a fire building emergency. Sometimes in the wayfinding process decision errors may occur mainly based on topological errors of the signage. A situation is critical if a decision about which path to take cannot be made with certainty, especially in a crisis situation. An agent-based simulation of human’s behavior in escaping from the fire with due attention to the building’s signage and dynamic nature of fire propagation affecting the wayfinding task is outlined in this paper. The hypothesis of the paper is that successful navigation is possible if the agent is able to make the correct decision through well-defined cues in critical cases, so the design of the building signage is evaluated through the agent-based simulation. Construction of mental representations of spatial environment and exploring models in the agent-based simulation have been proposed and a computational model successfully tested in an indoor complex hospital environment in different situations and the evacuation time from the building is computed. The most appropriate signage design resulted in the shortest evacuation time in various situations.