Campus communities are vulnerable to a wide range of emergencies such as active shooter incidents and fires, exposing students, teachers, and other members to significant risks. This Smart and Connected Communities Integrative Research Grant (SCC-IRG) project aims to explore new ways in which human behaviors are systemically and robustly incorporated into building design and emergency protocols. Specifically, the focus of the project is to understand how people in different roles respond to building emergencies, both individually and collectively, with empirical data collected from human-subject experiments, behavioral theories, and insights from domain experts. Intelligent crowd simulations are developed to represent the goals, preferences, and actions of diverse groups of building occupants as well as their interactions with others and the environment. The research team works synergistically with a range of campus community stakeholders, including first responders, law enforcement and emergency management personnel, and building designers to parameterize, validate, and test the crowd simulation. Appropriate applications are identified to mitigate safety and health risks. Underrepresented and underprivileged students are recruited into the research activities. Furthermore, the team explores the generalizability of the methodology, datasets, and research findings to non-building emergencies and non-campus communities.

Current crowd simulations for examining building emergencies often rely on oversimplified assumptions about human behaviors, lack cross-examination in different emergency contexts, and overlook the varied needs of stakeholders. To address these gaps, this project considers two common yet distinctive building emergencies (i.e., active shooter incidents, and fires) that are common in campus communities, and holistically models the impact of personal, social, and environmental factors on human behaviors of building occupants. The team implements agent-based models and develops multi-agent crowd simulations that capture individual and collective behaviors based on a highly reconfigurable and adaptable decision-theoretic framework. The team also engages campus stakeholders as well as other community members in a series of workshops to co-create likely and representative emergency scenarios. By allowing for exploring the outcomes of such “what-if” scenarios, the crowd simulation software has the potential to serve as a valuable tool for building designers, facility operators, and emergency managers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.