SAFEgress: A Flexible Platform to Study the Effect of Human and Social Behaviors on Egress Performance

Studies of past emergency events have revealed that occupants’ behaviors, local geometry, and environmental constraints affect crowd movement and govern the evacuation. In addition to comply with code and standards, building designers need to take into consideration the occupants’ social characteristics and the unique layout of the buildings to design occupant-centric egress systems. This paper describes an agent-based egress simulation tool, SAFEgress, which incorporates human and social behaviors during emergencies. Simulation results on two scenarios are presented. The first scenario illustrates the effects of exit strategies adopted by the occupants on the evacuation. The second scenario shows the influence of social group behavior on evacuation. By assuming different occupants’ behaviors using the SAFEgress prototype, engineers, designers, and facility managers can study the important human factors on egress situation and, thereby, improve the design of safe egress systems and procedures.

Acknowledgements: This research is partially supported by the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering at Stanford University. The first author is also supported by the Croucher Foundation Scholarship and Stanford’s Leavell Fellowship.