Investigating Evacuation Factors on the KTH Computer Science Chapter Hall using 3D Cellular Automata

Abstract: Aspects regarding safety is always a concern when designing buildings, especially in times of emergencies. Thus, evacuations of said buildings are of paramount importance. Unforeseen emergencies can arise from inside the building at any moment, and therefore, a building must have a sufficient amount of escape routes as a lack of them could lead to serious injuries and at times even death. This leads to the study's purpose, to investigate how the exit width, exit placement, amount of exits and the velocity of the evacuees correlate to evacuation time. The reason for investigating this was primarily to get an understanding of how these factors affect evacuation time. In order to investigate the given subject, a crowd simulation was made in Unity, based on cellular automata, as well as aspects from the game theory model. Furthermore, the building used for this study’s simulation was a virtual replica of the KTH Computer Science chapter building. By changing the cell size, as well as changing the width of the exits, we were able to answer the investigated questions. Regarding the exit width factor, it was disclosed that doubling the size of the exit width leads to a halving of the evacuation time. Even though the study found that the exit placement had an impact on evacuation time, there were no concrete relations found of what determines the impact. It was shown that more exits lead to faster escape time. But having one wider exit rather than two small exits of the same width leads to a faster evacuation time. The outcome reached about the velocity of the agents was that higher velocity leads to faster evacuation time. Lastly one can see the relevancy of using a crowd simulation to evaluate how good a building's escape routes are.