Simulation of labor evacuation: The case of housing construction projects

Construction sites occupy of the labors who are engaged in many different activities that can expose them to dangerous conditions. During emergencies and extreme events of natural or manmade origin in construction sites, saving labors lives is the primary objective. Therefore, the contractors are required to establish effective emergency plans which have to be improved to aid for rapid egress from construction sites. To support emergency evacuation planning, it is critical to estimate labor evacuation times during project execution. This paper presents a framework that utilizes building information modeling (BIM) and computer simulation to plan the evacuation of labors in construction sites during project execution and to visualize evacuation times of labors at emergency conditions at any time from project duration. The proposed framework utilizes MassMotion software as the simulation platform that enables predicting the labor evacuation times under various conditions. In addition, the evacuation time calculated from computer simulation is used to develop and evaluate the plan. A case study is worked out to demonstrate a simulation of emergency evacuation from a housing building during its construction to demonstrate the use of the proposed framework. Finally, the paper presents the simulation results of labors evacuation in the housing building construction sites.