Human and social behavior in computational modeling and analysis of egress

Safe egress is one of the key design issues identified by facility planners, manager and inspectors. Computational tools are now available for the simulation and design of emergency evacuation and egress. However, these tools rely heavily on assumptions about individual human and social behaviors, which have been found to be oversimplified, inconsistent and even incorrect. Furthermore, the behaviors are usually incorporated into the computational model in an ad hoc manner. This paper presents a framework for studying human and social behavior, from the perspectives of human decision-making and social interaction, and for incorporating such behavior systematically in a dynamic computational model suitable for emergency egress analysis.