Modeling of Macroscopic Building Evacuation Using IFC Data

Abstract

Presently, most models of crowd evacuations within a building are created manually. This is inefficient. To address this issue, this paper focuses on the differences and relationship between industry foundation classes (IFC) and the macroscopic network model for evacuation (MNME), and studies the mapping and construction methods used to convert entity objects into nodes and arcs in the MNME. Furthermore, corresponding attribute information in the MNME are established from IFC. Based on this process, the MNME is created and used as an input to EVACNET4 to obtain simulation results. Finally, the results, together with a 3D building model, are expressed in a unified environment. Our study results show that a network as well as the relevant attributes can be automatically generated from IFC, and can be adapted to different working conditions. The method proposed in this paper can automatically map the semantic information model to the MNME and the simulation result as well as the building model can be integrated in a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment.

Keywords

• building
• crowd evacuation
• scene modeling
• macroscopic network model for evacuation (MNME)
• EVACNET4 model