Escape dynamics in office buildings: using molecular-dynamics to quantify the impact of human behavior during emergency evacuation

Emergency evacuation of office buildings, in the event of a life-threatening situation such as a fire incident, is a function of various factors ranging from architectural to socio-behavioral ones. We show how individual-based modeling approaches such as molecular dynamics can be coupled with behavioral responses in panic situations, in order to quantify in a systematic way the impact of human familiarity to the space, during emergency evacuation. The ultimate goal is to identify certain crucial design features that can help in engineering better evacuation plans.