Using NetLogo to Simulate Building Occupancy of a University Building Environment

Building occupancy simulation is an interesting area of research for not only in the construction planning but for other applications such as security monitoring, crowd management, and occupant behavior analysis. Simulating an environment such as a university department allows a simulation model that will help in the study of scenarios that will help in evacuation during fire, earthquake or threat management. We can use the simulation system to study the behavior of students, teachers and analyze how an effective evacuation can be done in the current environment in real time. Agent-based modeling is the most popular method for developing models where there is an active interaction with the components of the model. Considering the need for agent-based models, we used NetLogo, an open source agent-based simulation software to build a simulation model for a building environment with occupants in it. The open source nature of the software and convenience in building Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications makes NetLogo a popular use to develop models for agent-based system requiring an interactive interface.