Environmental Effect on Egress Simulation
October 18, 2012
2:30 p.m.
Sam Rodriguez
Abstract
Evacuation and egress simulations can be a useful tool for studying the effect of design decisions on the flow of agent movement. This type of simulation can be used to determine before hand the effect of design decisions and enable exploration of potential improvements. In this work, we study how agent egress is affected by the environment in real world and large scale virtual environments and investigate metrics to analyze the flow. Our work differs from many evacuation systems in that we support grouping restrictions between agents (e.g., families or other social groups traveling together), and model scenarios with multiple modes of transportation with physically realistic dynamics (e.g., individuals walk from a building to their own cars and leave only when all people in the group arrive).
This is joint work with Nancy M. Amato, Mark Clayton, Firas Al-Douri, Andy Giese and Saied Zarrinmehr.