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This paper aims to present a systematic review of the published literature on building information model (BIM)-based simulation tools used for occupant evacuation over the past 23 years.

A literature review was conducted on BIM-based simulation tools used for occupant evacuation over the past 23 years. The search identified a total of 37 relevant papers, which were reviewed. The paper describes the use of BIM-based simulation tools over the years and identifies the research gaps.

BIM-based simulation tools have undergone progressive development, with constant improvements through the integration of advanced tools and collection of more data. These tools can assist in identifying faults in the building design. The outcomes of the simulation were not entirely accurate, as real-life scenarios vary depending on the various building types and the behavior of their occupants.

This study contributes to the literature through reviewing the capabilities of BIM-based simulation tools and the different simulation methods along with their limitations.

Fire safety engineers and architects can comprehend the utilization of BIM-based simulation tools to enhance the fire evacuation in light of their shortcomings and flaws.

BIM-based simulation tools are becoming more advanced and widely used. There has not been a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of the integration of BIM tools and simulation modeling for occupant evacuation. This study guides researchers on the capabilities and efficiencies of integrated solutions for occupant evacuations and their inherent shortcomings. The study identifies future research areas in BIM-based tools for occupant evacuation.

The purpose of this study is to create a framework that integrates GIS and microscopic simulation to optimize the placement of road barriers in emergency evacuation and assess the effectiveness via simulation. Human populations are at risk from many hazards including man-made and natural disasters, sudden events that are difficult to predict and prevent, but have catastrophic consequences. A critical issue in disaster management is timely evacuation that considers the dynamic traffic demand and congestions under dynamic hazard conditions. University campuses face a unique challenge in developing effective emergency evacuation plans due to their complex site configurations, high-dense buildings and dynamic spatial-temporal distribution of population.

The framework was implemented and tested on the main campus of the Western Michigan University to optimize the placement and configuration of road barriers to achieve an effective utilization of road network when the demand way exceeds the capacity. The resulting system was also used to test the effectiveness of the phased evacuation notification strategy, both with and without the optimal road barrier strategy.

It concluded that the newly created framework and its implementation could assist emergency evacuation planning for university campuses. It also concluded that placing road barriers at appropriate locations could reduce the evacuation time by 20 per cent or more under a variety of evacuation scenarios.

The originality of this research lies in three aspects of: a university campus context, the integration of GIS and microscopic simulation in emergency evacuation and the simulation based turn restriction strategy.

Metro stations have become a crucial aspect of urban rail transportation, integrating facilities, equipment and pedestrians. Impractical physical layout designs and pedestrian psychology impact the effectiveness of an evacuation during a metro fire. Prior research on emergency evacuation has overlooked the complexity of metro stations and failed to adequately consider the physical heterogeneity of stations and pedestrian psychology. Therefore, this study aims to develop a comprehensive evacuation optimization strategy for metro stations by applying the concept of design for safety (DFS) to an emergency evacuation. This approach offers novel insights into the management of complex systems in metro stations during emergencies.

Physical and social factors affecting evacuations are identified. Moreover, the social force model (SFM) is modified by combining the fire dynamics model (FDM) and considering pedestrians' impatience and panic psychology. Based on the Nanjing South Metro Station, a multiagent-based simulation (MABS) model is developed. Finally, based on DFS, optimization strategies for metro stations are suggested.

The most effective evacuation occurs when the width of the stairs is 3 meters and the transfer corridor is 14 meters. Additionally, a luggage disposal area should be set up. The exit strategy of the fewest evacuees is better than the nearest-exit strategy, and the staff in the metro station should guide pedestrians correctly.

Previous studies rarely consider metro stations as sociotechnical systems or apply DFS to proactively reduce evacuation risks. This study provides a new perspective on the evacuation framework of metro stations, which can guide the designers and managers of metro stations.

Modern subway transportation systems need to satisfy increasing safety demands to rapidly evacuate passengers under hazardous emergency circumstances, such as fires, accidents or terrorist attacks, to reduce passenger injuries or life losses. The emergency evacuation capacity (EEC) of a subway station needs to be revised timely, in case passenger demand increases or the evacuation route changes in the future. However, traditional ways of estimating EEC, e.g. fire drills are time- and resource-consuming and are difficult to revise from time to time. The purpose of this study is to establish an intuitive modelling approach to increase the EEC of subway stations in a stepwised manner.

This study develops an approach to combine agent-based evacuation modelling and building information modelling (BIM) technology to estimate the total evacuation time of a subway station.

Evacuation time can be saved (33% in the studied case) from iterative improvements including stopping escalators running against the evacuation flow and modifying the geometry around escalator exits. Such iterative improvements rely on integrating agent-based modelling and BIM.

The agent-based model can provide a more realistic simulation of intelligent individual movements under emergency circumstances and provides precise feedback on locations of evacuation bottlenecks. This study also examined the effectiveness of two rounds of stepwise improvements in terms of operation or design to increase the EEC of the station.

The objectives of this article are to present the findings of a case study conducted to determine the optimal emergency egress time for the main library of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, using an evacuation simulation model; discuss the importance of the use of evacuation simulation models to architects, fire protection engineers and facilities managers; and demonstrate the importance of using an evacuation simulation model in understanding evacuation performance and conducting building safety assessment.

The authors have reviewed the published literature in the field of evacuation analysis considering level of service (LOS) as a significant factor; studied the input requirements of the evacuation simulation model EVACNET4 and estimated the same for the library facility at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals; and examined selected results and validated the same using FPETool.

The study revealed that the evacuation times obtained using both EVACNET4 and FPETool for the library are different and vary 49 seconds in magnitude.

Risk to life as a result of fire in buildings is a key concern for facility managers, architects and insurance companies. This study could be of practical help to fire protection engineers and facilities managers from the viewpoint of emergency evacuation planning in specific facilities, and to architects during the process of designing the spatial layout of the library facility, where even minor changes in the layout can have large impacts on egress time.

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive study on building, fire and evacuation, so as to effectively improve the efficiency of building fire evacuation and the management level of fire evacuation site. Make up for the difficulties of BIM technology in effectively connecting building information and fire data.

First, this paper establishes a fire model and an evacuation model based on BIM information. Then, the safety index (SI) is introduced as a comprehensive index, and the IRI is established by integrating the SI function to evaluate the safety of evacuation routes. Based on these two indices, the IRI-based fire evacuation model is established.

This study offers an Improved Risk Index (IRI)-based fire evacuation model, which may achieve effective evacuation in fire scenes. And the model is verified by taking the fire evacuation of a shopping center building as an example.

This paper proposes a fire evacuation principle based on IRI, so that the relevant personnel can comprehensively consider the fire factors and evacuation factors to achieve the optimization of building design, thereby improving the fire safety of buildings.

The purpose of this study is to develop optimal evacuation plan to provide valuable theoretical and practical insight in the fire evacuation work of similar structures, by proposing a systematic simulation-based guided-evacuation agent-based model (GAM) and a three-stage mathematical evacuation model to investigate how to simulate, assess and improve the performance efficiency of the evacuation plan.

The authors first present the self-evacuation and guided-evacuation models to determine the optimal evacuation plan in ship chamber. Three key performance indicators are put forward to quantitatively assess the evacuation performance within the two fire scenarios. The evacuation model in tower is built to obtain the dividing points of the three different fire evacuation plans.

The study shows that the optimal evacuation plan determined by the GAM considering social relationships effectively relieves the congestion or collision of evacuees and improves the evacuation uniformity. The optimal evacuation plan not only solves the crush caused by congestion or collision of evacuees but also can greatly shorten the evacuation time for passenger ship fire.

This study establishes the GAM considering the interactive evacuee characteristics and the proportion of evacuees guided by the crew members to make the optimal evacuation plan more time-efficient. The self-evacuation process is simulated to assess the performance of the guided-evacuation strategies, which are used to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the optimal evacuation plan in this research.

It has been witnessed that many incidents of crowd evacuation have resulted in catastrophic results, claiming lives of hundreds of people. Most of these incidents were a result of localized herding that eventually turned into global panic. Many crowd evacuation models have been proposed with different aspects of interests. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to bring together many of these aspects to study evacuation dynamics.

The proposed agent-based model, in a hypothetical physical environment, uses perception maps for routing decisions which are constructed from agents’ personal observations of the surroundings as well as information gathered through distant communication. Communication is governed by a trust model which measures the authenticity of the information being shared. Agents are of two types; emotional and rational. The trust model is combined with a game-theoretic model to resolve conflict of agents’ own type with that of types of agents in the neighborhood.

Evacuation dynamics in different environmental and exit strategies are evaluated on the basis of reduced herding and evacuation time. Using this integrated information sharing model, agents gain an overall view of the environment, sufficient to select the optimal path towards exits with respect to reduced herding and evacuation time.

The proposed model has been formulated and established using an agent-based simulation integrating important modeling aspects. The paper helps in understanding the interplay between technological and humanistic aspects in smart and pervasive environments.

Computer‐aided decision‐support tools are part and parcel of the emergency planning and management process today. Much is dependent on using modern technology to gather and analyse data on damage assessment, meteorology, demography, etc. and provide decision support for prevention/mitigation, response and recovery. Diverse technologies are merged to provide useful functions to aid the emergency planner/manager. Complexities arise when attempting to link several streams of technology to achieve a realistic, usable and reliable decision‐support tool. This discussion identifies and analyses the challenging issues faced in linking two technologies: simulation modelling and GIS, to design spatial decision‐support systems for evacuation planing. Experiences in designing CEMPS, a prototype designed for area evacuation planning, are drawn on to discuss relevant managerial, behavioural, processual and technical issues. Focus is placed on modelling evacuee behaviour, generating realistic scenarios, validation, logistics, etc. while also investigating future trends and developments.

The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated approach to fire safety assessment, through combining the outcomes of a checklist tailored to the requirements of the International Building Code (IBC), and an evacuation simulation tool (EVACNET4), applied to a student housing facility as case study.

The authors reviewed relevant literature and previous studies pertaining to fire safety assessment and management. An assessment checklist was developed according to the requirements of the IBC. EVACNET4 simulation tool was utilized to model the evacuation of the facility under review. The results derived from the aforementioned steps were correlated to identify potential corroborating or conflicting issues pertaining to the safe evacuation of building occupants in the occurrence of a fire incident.

Fire safety provisions were found to be adequate, and the building can be evacuated safely in about 190 seconds, should a fire occur. The architectural design aspects of the exit doors which might cause potential bottlenecks were identified.

A completely fire safe building does not exist, and thus more integrative approaches to fire safety assessment and management will reduce to the least extent possible fire risks. A holistic fire safety management of campus housing is of paramount interest to the campus community, and the building industry at large.