Modeling human emergency evacuation in Sri Lankan hospitals: an agent-based approach

Abstract

Hospitals are crucial assets to society, and it is essential to maintain uninterrupted services even during emergencies. However, hospitals themselves are high-risk locations for disastrous events due to factors such as a vulnerable population. Therefore, efficient planning of disaster risk reduction measures, including effective evacuation planning, is essential to ensure the resilience of a hospital. Evacuation simulations are widely used to understand complex human behavior and effectively plan evacuation procedures. This study presents a pioneering step in evacuation simulation for Sri Lankan hospitals. AnyLogic, an agent-based simulation software, is used to evaluate how the physical environment of a general hospital ward affects different evacuation scenarios, assessing safe evacuation times and identifying congested locations by considering additional parameters like crowd density and corridor width. The findings suggest that providing additional emergency exits to facilitate crowd movement is more effective than relying on crowd control techniques administered by hospital staff. Moreover, the study underscores the significance of designing corridors with adequate width to support crowd evacuation during emergencies. Additionally, this study discusses the strengths and limitations of the current research, providing insights for future studies in evacuation simulations for Sri Lankan hospitals.