Occupant Dynamics: Towards a New Design Performance Measure

Abstract

With the advent of more robust computer modeling techniques, the ability to model human behavior such as the movement of occupants in building spaces has become increasingly accurate. In the last thirty years, several research efforts have proposed models for pedestrian/occupant movements. This paper reports on recent research on occupant simulation in building spaces and specifically presents a proposed basic measure for analyzing the design of building spaces in terms of space accessibility. The proposed measure, namely the Random Access Measure (RAM), is presented as a useful and simple design analysis technique that relates to occupant movement as well as to space topology. A computerized prototype is developed and presented in this paper along with a simple example. A discussion of the RAM and similar analysis techniques such as visibility graphs and isovists is presented.

Keywords:

• Occupant movement
• Dynamics
• Random walks
• Architectural design