Using the combined LADM-IndoorGML model to support building evacuation

Abstract

During an incident, many people that are located in indoor environments require to follow emergency evacuation procedures. The ‘emergency evacuation’ term has been defined as ‘a critical movement of people from a dangerous area due to the risk or an incident of a tragic event’ (Bonabeau, 2002). An emergency evacuation could be needed in a life or death situation, regardless if it begins with a natural non-intended incident or a terrorist attack. Many researchers have studied the behaviour of the people during the evacuation because of several incidents with panic attacks that have led to injuries including death of people being crushed or trampled down by others. In crisis situation, the perception of the indoor environment, which differs from person to person, play a critical role in the evacuation. Also, the access rights of the indoor spaces are different from those rights (and restrictions) during normal times. They may positively impact the movements of the people during the evacuation by providing suggestions for shorter/better route. This paper addresses the impact of the access rights of the indoor spaces during an emergency evacuation. We employ the conceptual model of LADM-IndoorGML that defines the accessibility of the indoor spaces based on the rights, restrictions, and responsibilities of the user of the indoor space. The access rights of the indoor spaces are affected by the crisis event and this needs to be modelled explicitly (and before crisis situation). Actually, the rights/restrictions persons have on spaces is time dependent: normal operation hours, outside normal operation hours (e.g. during night time in case of a University building) or during crisis times. These actual/valid rights and restrictions affect the movement / accessibility of the users to reach the nearest emergency exits or the safe zone. For this reason, different scenarios have to be developed to study the impact of the accessibilities for different types of users. In this paper we will present the 3D model of an educational building that was built for the purpose of evacuation study. The 3D model is supported by real data for all spaces from the facility management department such as information on departments, sections, groups of users (visitors, employees, and students), and public/private spaces, etc. and a real evacuation exercise. We consider it extremely important to develop our information model based on international standards (LADM/ISO 19152, OGC IndoorGML, ISO 19141, ISO 19107) as we expect that this information will be part of the future ‘building infrastructure’ and applications all over the world can understand and use this data when entering or leaving a certain building both during normal and crisis situations. Different types of applications are anticipated to be based on this information model; e.g. mobile indoor routing app (for normal building users and Emergency Response Team members), crisis evacuation desktop application for command centre, etc.