Modern infrastructure design demands a scientific basis of how people interact with their natural environment. However, populations are aging in North America and we have limited information about how they behave in their surroundings. With that brings many challenges that need to be realized for building safety and hazard mitigation, few of which we currently understood to design our built infrastructure safely. In 2014, the effect of this was seen in Canada with the L'isle Verte care home fire which claimed the lives of 30 seniors and two staff. Our ability to understand and rationally predict the movement and behavior of an aging population is critical to how we can plan fire-safe modern and future infrastructure in Canada. Human movement data from five fire drills for homes for the aged were provided to Carleton University researchers which characterize this behavior in raw qualitative and quantitative form for this research. This data can be used for validating and
further developing computational software for designing modern infrastructure to meet hazard risks. Our main research objective is to analyze and then utilize this collected behavior data to develop a validated software algorithm so that the behavior of aging populations in emergency situations, particularly fire hazard situations, can be planned for in the design of infrastructure. ARUP Canada, the industrial partner, has a critical need for an improved and validated understanding of human behavior of aging populations, particularly in hazard conditions such as fire, to safely design infrastructure in Canada. The proposed research's outcomes will help improve and provide more realistic modelling for representing aging population agent behavior in Arup's commercial 3D pedestrian simulator; "MassMotion". This validated and realistic algorithm, which is critical to their engineering work in facility design for populations of the aged particularly in Canada, will be used to plan
infrastructures for aging populations in Canada and globally.