An approach for modeling human cognitive behavior in evacuation models

This paper aims to propose a method to assess human cognitive behavior in fire emergency evacuation situations. The simulation models currently available do not address this issue in an appropriate manner. If we do not consider cognitive aspects of the human being during the process of evacuation, the results provided by such models might be far from reality. The method is called “start of evacuation motion” analysis and is based on logic diagrams called continuous and single value networks (Process Safety Prog. 20 (2001) 1-10). The logic diagrams have shown to be a very powerful tool to analyze the cognitive aspects of human beings during a fire emergency situation. Questions like how the approach is used, where to find the input data necessary and what results are obtained are discussed.