Considering Individuals with Disabilities in a Building Evacuation: An Agent-Based Simulation Study

Catastrophic events in the United States have highlighted numerous issues regarding effective emergency evacuations. In existing studies, individuals with disabilities have not been a significant feature of evacuation investigations due to the lack of empirical data and thus their evacuation needs have been generally overlooked. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how effectively the built environmental accommodates the needs of individuals with disabilities during emergency evacuations. Specifically, the authors explored whether there is a difference between the general population and population with considering individuals with disabilities in terms of time to egress via an agent-based microsimulation called BUMMPEE model. This model can consider several types of disabilities explicitly in terms of speed, ability to negotiate the environment, and psychological profile depending on type of disability. The model was applied for a real four story office building. The results of simulation experiments show that there is a significant difference between mean evacuation time for homogenous and heterogeneous populations. An increase in population size leads to an increased difference. Additionally, results demonstrate that the fourth floor of the building has the worst performance among other floors and persons who use wheelchairs are most at risk during emergency evacuation process.