A model-driven and simulation-based method to analyze building evacuation plans

Modern buildings are often expected to satisfy minimum safety requirements to define upper bounds for safety metrics, such as evacuation time. The building design must therefore consider prediction of these metrics for a set of representative evacuation scenarios. These scenarios can be rather complex, and often can be investigated only using building evacuation simulators. However, these simulators might require considerable development effort, and their use might therefore become less convenient, for time and cost issues. In this respect, this paper introduces a model-driven method to automatically develop building evacuation simulators from informal specifications of building evacuation scenarios, i.e., building plans and behavioral descriptions of evacuees. Specifically, the paper shows how a floor plan develops in the structural characteristics of an Extended Queueing Network (EQN) model and how the behavioral description can be used to parameterize the EQN model. The paper also presents an example application along with preliminary validation issues.