TOWARDS EGRESS MODELLING IN VOXEL BUILDING MODELS

Egress (or Evacuation) modelling has the purpose to simulate how the people inside a building can move outside in a safe manner and as quick as possible in case of an emergency. The goal can be to assess the safety of an existing building or a building design, to establish evacuation routes and install signage, or even to give real-time guidance to the evacuating crowd during an emergency. In all cases, the availability of a three-dimensional building model allows to generate the necessary input for the egress modelling software. The algorithms for such software can be subdivided into two major categories, working with navigation grids or navigation networks, respectively. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that voxel-based building models are particularly suited to provide input for both categories. We further illustrate how to process might continue using an algorithm based on (electrical) network analysis, which can be applied in both a gridded and a network-based simulation. We provide preliminary results for the gridded case.