EvacAgent: A Building Emergency Evacuation Simulation Model Based on Agent

The building emergency evacuation model not only can help emergency rescue, but also provide technical support for building safety evacuation design evaluation and optimization. This paper presents a new building emergency evacuation simulation model - EvacAgent, which is developed applying Agent-based Modeling (ABM) method. Two important promotions are performed in the model comparing (compared) with other ones: 1) a new path selection strategy based on personal knowledge on the building environment but not the widely used global optimal path selection strategy of agent is proposed, which gives more consistent with the reality to the model. 2) The interaction between the individuals and the evacuation signs is considered in the model that is generally ignored in other ones, which makes more realistic evacuation simulation. In this paper, the modeling method (including Agent, environment, evacuation signs and Agent behavior rule) and the structure of the model are described, and an emergency evacuation simulation case of a large supermarket is performed. It is proved by the statistical analysis results given by the model that the characteristics of the evacuation simulation are consistent with the real situation, but some problems affecting the simulation results are also found, for example the environmental memory of Agent is not well described in the model.