Simulating use scenarios in hospitals using multi-agent narratives

Abstract

Anticipating building-related complexities ensuing from occupants' behaviour is a major challenge in architectural design. Conventional building performance simulation tools model occupancy in a highly aggregated form, abstracting away the impact of dynamic spatial and social factors on occupant behaviour. To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent system that accounts for these aspects in process-driven facilities, such as hospitals. The approach involves modelling 'narratives', rule-based scripts that direct occupants' movement and shared activities. A scheduling mechanism employs Operations Research techniques to dynamically coordinate the narratives' execution. We demonstrate the method by simulating dayto-day operations in a typical hospital setting, involving scheduled procedures and unscheduled adaptations due to dynamic social and environmental conditions. The process involved collecting data using field observations and interviews with experts, modelling narratives, and simulating them to produce use scenarios that can be visualized and analysed by design stakeholders.

Simulating the impact of facility design on operations: a study in an internal medicine ward

“…Recent work on narrative-based modeling (Schaumann et al , 2017) demonstrated a practical approach to simulating day-to-day occupancy scenarios in medical facilities while representing dynamic building–occupant interactions. This approach is centered on narratives: computer scripts that store a pre-defined set of activities that involve multiple types of actors and unfold across several spaces .…”

“…First, we identified human behavior patterns in existing internal medicine wards and abstract them with the help of hospital managers, so they can be applied to generic facilities of the same type (details in Section 4). We then modeled these patterns computationally using a narrative-based approach (Schaumann et al , 2017) and simulated them in the two different design options (details in Section 5). The simulation results have been analyzed with respect to representative KPIs of day-to-day activities in hospital buildings (details in Section 6)[1].…”

“…A recent work proposed a narrative-based modeling framework to simulate the behavior of heterogeneous types of occupants (e.g. doctors, nurses, patients, visitors) engaged in a variety of scheduled and unscheduled behaviors in hospital settings (Schaumann et al , 2017). This approach can represent fine-grained human behavior patterns, which are affected by building design features as well as the presence and activities of other occupants.…”

Joint Exploration and Analysis of High-Dimensional Design–Occupancy Templates

“…Researchers have used crowd simulation techniques to simulate the movement of people in built environments to approximate buildingoccupant behaviors. Some approaches focus on day-to-day behavior of people in offices [Goldstein et al 2010], hospitals [Schaumann et al 2017], and universities [Shen et al 2012]).…”

Interactive spatial analytics for human-aware building design

“…Several approaches have been proposed to represent specific aspects of human behavior in architectural design using a combination of static and dynamic analyses. Such approaches include pedestrian movement [Yan and Kalay 2004], emergency egress [Chu et al 2014;Pan et al 2007], occupant presence and actions to support energy analyses [Goldstein et al 2010], people movement in university buildings [Shen et al 2013], and collaborative medical procedures in hospitals [Schaumann et al 2017a]. Nonetheless, how static and dynamic human-related analysis tools are actually used in architectural design to support architects' decision-making is still a relatively under-studied topic.…”