ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has made virus transmission a significant factor in designing buildings to ensure a safe and resilient environment. Simulation has been applied to analyze the potential risk of virus transmission within built spaces. Still, most existing simulations focused on a small region of the building, over a short period of time. Here we cover how we leveraged an occupancy simulation to inform and visualize the longitudinal impacts of virus transmission, in relation to a given building design and associated dynamic occupant behaviours. The flexibility of our system makes our simulation scalable and adaptable so that it can be applied to any building or context, with various types of occupants. © 2021 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic changed our lives, forcing us to reconsider our built environment, architectural designs, and even behaviours. Multiple stakeholders, including designers, building facility managers, and policy makers, are making decisions to reduce SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission and make our environment safer;however, systems to effectively and interactively evaluate virus transmission in physical spaces are lacking. To help fill this gap, we propose OccSim, a system that automatically generates occupancy behaviours in a 3D model of a building and helps users analyze the potential effect of virus transmission from a large-scale and longitudinal perspective. Our participatory evaluation with four groups of stakeholders revealed that OccSim could enhance their decision making processes by identifying specific risks of virus transmission in advance, and illuminating how each risk relates to complex human-building interactions. We reflect on our design and discuss OccSim's potential implications in the domains of gdesign evaluation,' ggenerative design,' and gdigital twins.' © 2021 ACM.