Planning Building Renovation Projects for Safe Evacuation Provisions - An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

During building renovation projects, the space is shared between the construction crews and occupants. The construction works change the building layout and movement flow, which increase the occupants' vulnerability, affecting their evacuation behaviour under emergency conditions. Hence, the safety and wellbeing of the occupants should be considered during renovation planning. Accordingly, this paper presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) co-simulation framework that utilizes workspace management to represent the occupied spaces during construction, and to evaluate their impact on evacuation under fire incidents. This framework was used to evaluate the construction plan alternatives of the 9th floor of Concordia's EV building, resulting in a maximum of 17% delay in evacuation time in one alternative.