A Review of Aircraft Evacuation Models and Behavioural Simulations

Originally, computer modelling and the simulation of an evacuating aircraft was pursued by the Civil Aero-medical Institute with one of the first computer based evacuation models being developed by IBM back in the 1970s. This modelling required the use of large and expensive mainframe computers. Aircraft evacuation modelling has improved significantly since that time as personal computers have become more powerful in their ability to rapidly simulate and predict possible evacuation scenario outcomes such as certification tests or to reconstruct real aircraft accidents. This paper will review a number of aircraft evacuation models used over the past 50 years with some of the models including both human behavior and computational fire dynamics.