Development of macroscopic evacuation model for BIM-FSE integration

Currently, there are several examples of applications and technologies for combining BIM authoring and FSE modeling for evacuation simulations and occupant movement analysis (OMA). Most of these solutions are based on microscopic pedestrian dynamics models, which results in large volumes of data that need to be stored and processed in BIM models.

The presentation will discuss a new solver for a macroscopic evacuation modeling based on the fundamental dependencies and properties of pedestrian flows in the works of Predtechensky and Milinsky, John Fruin and their followers.

Unlike many macroscopic models, in which the movement of pedestrian flows is represented in the form of directed graphs consisting of nodes and edges, in the model the movement of flows is represented as a directed sequence of small 2D regions of the evacuation route, connected to each other at adjacent edges. Such regions can be areas of different type of flows - linear movement of flows, areas of flows intersection and merging and areas of flows formation of freely moving pedestrians.

This approach makes it possible to simplify development of preprocessors to convert an architectural BIM model into a computational evacuation model, and on the other hand, reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored in the BIM model as simulation results.