IntroductionThis paper presents a multi-agent based framework to simulate human and social behaviors during emergency evacuations. Among the many regulatory provisions governing a facility design, one of the key issues identified by facility managers and building inspectors is safe egress. Design of egress for places of public assembly is a formidable problem in facility and safety engineering. There have been numerous incidents reported regarding overcrowding and crushing during emergency situations [1]. In addition to injuries and loss of lives, the accompanying post-disaster psychological suffering, financial loss, and adverse publicity have long-term negative effects on the affected individuals and organizations -the survivors, the victims' families, and the local communities.Among the many factors including overcrowding and evacuation incidents, researchers have come to realize that understanding human and social behaviors in emergencies is crucial to improve crowd safety in places of public assembly [2][3][4][5][6]. In particular, 'nonadaptive crowd behaviors' are recognized to be responsible for the death and injury of most victims in crowd disasters [7]. Nonadaptive crowd behaviors refer to the destructive actions that a crowd may experience in emergency situations, such as stampede, pushing, knocking, and trampling on others. Studying nonadaptive crowd behaviors in emergency situations is difficult since it often requires exposing real people to the actual, possibly dangerous, environment. A good computational tool that takes into consideration the human and social behavior of a crowd could serve as a viable alternative.Commercially available computational tools for the simulation and design of emergency exits exist. However, most of the current computational tools focus on the modeling of spaces and occupancies but rarely take into consideration of human and

No abstract

No abstract