Simulating Assisted Evacuation Using Unity3D

Past studies on emergency events have revealed that occupants’ behaviours and capabilities, procedural aspects and environmental constraints affect the evacuation performance of different types of buildings including healthcare facilities. Healthcare facility management needs to consider the occupants’ capabilities as well as the unique floor layouts of such environments to design occupant-centric evacuation systems. Occupants at a healthcare facility can be divided into three groups as independent (whose mobility is not impaired in any way), dependent (except those defined as independent or highly-dependent) and highly-dependent (whose clinical condition creates a high-dependency on other people). Dependent and highly-dependent occupants should be assisted by others during the evacuation process. Therefore, assisted evacuation sub-model can be considered as a fundamental feature of an evacuation modelling tool when simulating healthcare facility evacuation to estimate total evacuation times. Currently, there exist over 60 evacuation models, however, few can simulate assisted evacuation. This paper demonstrates that game engines, such as Unity3D, could be useful tools to develop assisted evacuation sub-models based on the artificial intelligence of autonomous agents.