Early-Stage Egress Simulation for Process-Driven Buildings

Many complex buildings such as hospitals, airports and industrial facilities are process-driven, meaning that their design is conceived around the daily work routines of the staff, usually captured using business processes (e.g. by using flowcharts or Business Process Modeling Notation). The main idea and contribution of our approach is to leverage such a static process model in order to facilitate a dynamic egress simulation. In detail, we perform a process simulation until a specified time t is reached. As result, we get the typical location of the working staff as well as occupancy of all areas of the building, which we then feed into an agent-based egress simulation. As result, we can obtain the evacuation performance at time t under consideration of the building’s process model, i.e. different usage scenarios throughout the day. This hybrid approach between process simulation and pedestrian simulation is especially suited for early stages of building design, when different spatial configurations and process variants are under consideration. In this context, the approach is just one part of many lines of architectonical reasoning, covering foremost the problem of accessibility and adjacency by means of pedestrian simulation.