Human Library for Emergency Evacuation in BIM-Based Serious Game Environment

It is difficult - and most of the time virtually impossible in reality - to conduct an evacuation test to study human behavior in the building condition during emergency situations (e.g. a burning building). Therefore, a serious game engine integrated with rich building information can provide an effective and efficient alternative. Anew serious gaming approach, based on Building Information Modeling (BIM), integrated with rich building information can simulate different emergency situations. It can also provide a 3D visualization and an interactive way for exploration of the effect of building conditions on human behavior during the evacuation process. However, human behavior and reaction to the emergency environment is one of the most important, but hard to predict, perspectives in the prediction of emergency evacuation time and results. Consequently, the development of a human library that contains validated human egress behaviors is the key to the simulation of evacuation in an emergency environment and the development of an accurate emergency evacuation analysis. This study develops the framework to build the human library through a BIM-based gaming environment. Parameters of human beings that should be considered are discussed and the values of these parameters are collected from the players of the developed emergency scenario (game). The repository of the human library is based on the framework of Agent Based Modeling (ABM) where human behavioral data is encapsulated as methods of agents. To overcome the limitations related to individual human factors, the hypothesis is that human behavior can be explored in a serious cyber game, and the decision made by the human in the game scenario is identical to the decision during the same situation in the real world.