Using BIM to Support Simulation of Compliant Building Evacuation

Abstract

Buildings must have a means of evacuating their occupants at times of emergency such as in the event of a fire. Such a provision typically needs to conform to applicable regulatory requirements. For simple buildings, this is achieved by incorporating a set of prescriptive requirements into the design. For more complex buildings, engineering analysis and simulation using advanced computational tools are often necessary to demonstrate conformance. This analysis and simulation process can be laborious if the required geometric and occupant data must be manually gathered from paper-based design information and relevant regulatory publications. BIM can provide an effective sharing of building information for the simulation stage and the output from the simulation can be used for compliance audit. In this paper, we develop a process of sharing BIM data with a probabilistic network evacuation simulation tool and use the output from the tool to inform a computeraided compliance audit framework.