Agent-based evacuation model of large public buildings under fire conditions

It is an important issue that all occupants should be able to evacuate to safety from large public buildings under fire conditions. In this paper, a system simulation model is presented, in which a physical model and a mathematical model are included. Based on the agent technology. a computer program is developed to simulate and analyze the egress progress in large public buildings through combining rule reasoning with numerical calculation, and some crowd pedestrian flow phenomenon. such as aching, rerouting. etc, could be observed from visual illustration of the scenarios. By coupling with the fire scenario simulated by CFD technology, the computer simulation program may represent the overall and dynamic process of occupants' evacuation under fire expansion. and the mutual relationship between occupants' safety and fire hazard. An indoor stadium which was used as a competition venue for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is studied as a case. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.