Agent-Based Simulation of Evacuation: An Office Building Case Study

Understanding people behavior and movement characteristics during building evacuation is valuable in evaluating building designs and the effectiveness of evacuation policies. Simulation can be a powerful tool since real data on building evacuation are rarely available and costly to obtain. On the other hand, state-of-the-art in evacuation modeling is the use of agent-based simulations, which are computationally expensive for simulating evacuation in very large buildings. In this paper, we present an agent-based simulation model developed for a 2-story office building verified using the evacuation data collected using video cameras during fire drills in the building. Following model parameter calibration to reflect the actual building traffic characteristics, it is shown that the agent-based simulation model is able to match the real data with high accuracy in terms of the cumulative number of people exiting the building during the evacuation. The paper also presents a graph-based complexity reduction approach that can reduce computation requirements and thus be used for large-scale applications.