Saving Lives with Generative Design and Agent-based Modeling

Abstract

The increasing number of crowd disasters has awakened the need to evaluate the evacuation performance of buildings. However, the information available in building design guidance documents is insufficient to efficiently address safety requirements and official metrics do not take into consideration crucial factors for the success of emergency evacuations, namely the people's dynamics. Although modeling human behavior is not trivial, the recent approach of Agent-Based modeling has been facilitating this task, thus being a suitable tool for evacuation simulations. Nevertheless, the potentialities of this approach are still quite unexplored. Although Agent-Based modeling is already being applied in security analysis tests, its use in combination with Generative Design (GD) is still very limited. In this work, we show how a combination of both approaches improves the safety of buildings.