Un modello di simulazione del comportamento umano negli edifici

Predicting future users’ behaviour and their activities in a building is a cardinal and highly complex task that designers have to face during the design process. Even though architects and their clients have at their disposal several computational tools which can help them to predict and evaluate many aspects of building performance such as cost, energy consumption, and structural integrity, they have no means to predict and evaluate how well the proposed design will perform from the users’ point of view. Simulative approaches are gradually overcoming this shortcoming but, at present, they are limited to the representation of specific occurrences and behavioural performance aspects -such as emergency egress and crowd behaviour- while more extensive and comprehensive representations of human behaviour in built environments, able to simulate everyday life and activities in buildings, are still missing. Capitalizing on current developments in the video game industry, this research -partially developed at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and at Berkeley University of California- aims at establishing a new approach to human behaviour simulation in built environments, based on a clear, reliable and precise formalization of the use processes as specific structures of active entities called Events. Their role is to comprise knowledge about the building users, the activities they perform and the spaces where those specific activities are performed. Equipped with AI engines, events control and coordinate the actors’ behaviour during the simulation, providing a coherent representation of their interaction, cooperation and collaboration. The proposed model allows designers to test and evaluate the impact of their decisions on future users’ life and activities in the design process, when it is still possible to intervene to improve the quality of the final product, to solve critical issues and to reduce time and costs. To test its reliability, the model has been applied to simulate the functioning of a hospital nursing ward, both in routine and emergency circumstances.