Impact of Spatial Knowledge on Fire Evacuation Performance in Large Buildings: An Integrated Simulation Approach

This study examines human evacuation performance in complex building environments under highly uncertain fire conditions, with a focus on how spatial knowledge and decision-making strategies influence exposure to hazardous conditions during emergencies in smart building contexts. A hybrid simulation framework integrating physical fire modeling, agent-based simulation (ABM), and data-driven analysis is applied to a large academic building in Santiago, Chile, incorporating heterogeneous occupant profiles with different levels of spatial knowledge while evaluating key environmental variables such as temperature, oxygen (O2) concentration, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations. Stochastic behavioral variability is captured through Monte Carlo simulation, and associations between environmental conditions and evacuation responses are analyzed using Kendall’s correlation. Results show that evacuation strategies based on optimal route knowledge significantly reduce exposure to life-threatening conditions and decrease evacuation times by 34% for adults and 8.5% for young occupants compared with scenarios without prior spatial information. These findings highlight the critical role of spatial knowledge in evacuation decision-making and provide a transferable methodological framework for improving smart building safety systems and data-driven evacuation planning in high-occupancy urban environments.