A scalable fluid flow process algebraic approach to emergency egress analysis

Pervasive environments offer an increasing number of services to a large number of people moving within these environments including timely information about where to go and when. People using these services interact with the system but they are also meeting other people and performing other activities as relevant opportunities arise. The design of such systems and the analysis of collective dynamic behaviour of people within them is a challenging problem. In previous work we have successfully explored a scalable analysis of stochastic process algebraic models of smart signage systems. In this paper we focus on the validation of a representative example of this class of models in the context of emergency egress. This context has the advantage that detailed data is available from studies with alternative analysis methods. A second aim is to show how realistic human behaviour, often observed in emergency egress, can be embedded in the model and how the effect of this behaviour on building evacuation can be analysed in an efficient and scalable way. © 2010 IEEE.