Emergency Management Simulator for Modeling Crowd Behaviour Under Fire and Toxic Gas Expansion

Today, the demand for building security has grown considerably, especially for evacuations in cases of fire, chemical, biological and radiological incidents or terrorist attacks. However, the planning of relevant safety measures for new buildings or the evaluation of existing buildings requires reliable information for a farsighted decision making. Disaster planning and response simulation tools that can realistically map the spread of fire, smoke and pollutants in buildings already exist. More and more often realistic 3D simulations are being asked for, which is becoming possible with the continuous growth of computer power.

This paper presents the concept and current development results of an emergency management model, built in AnyLogic disaster modeling software, for fire, smoke and pollutant gas spread in buildings in cases of fire, chemical, biological and radiological incidents and terrorist attacks. Model development comprises the following tasks:

• Development of an emergency management simulator specifically optimized for the targeted application domain of fire and toxic gas expansion in buildings;
• Development of a crowd simulation tool with dedicated behaviour patterns for fire and hazardous context;
• Coupling of emergency management simulator and people flow simulations to an integrated co-simulation using as baseline the Functional Mock-up approach;
• Enabling continuous interaction of the simulations with the building model data, considering also the possible dynamic state changes of the latter in the progress of the simulation process;
• Embedding the simulation system into a BIM based virtual 3D Lab for building design;
• Development of an application program interface (API) for modular integration of the simulation services in a compute cloud environment for achievement of fast online response.

The emergency management simulator is based on an existing software application for the simulation of fire in tunnels. It will be strongly extended by an open library of building materials including functions for material heat release rates, consideration of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment, coupling of the mass transport and the Navier-Stokes equations, and combination of fire and smoke spread models with a radiological model.

The people flow simulation will be based on the simulation capabilities of AnyLogic multi-purpose disaster modeling software, extended by a database for human behaviour patterns combining physical and psychological models.

The developed disaster planning simulation system will be of benefit for a number of different actors in the construction process such as designers, facility managers, owners, security personnel, public authorities and insurances, especially with regard to the planning of safety measures, the evaluation of existing buildings and the development of training scenarios for rescue and security teams. The integrated multimodel BIM functionality will enable easy to use visual examination of evacuation plans and virtual team training thereby helping to improve the overall quality of the design process regarding high-rise buildings, shopping malls, railway stations and airport terminals.