The article is devoted to the study of crowd behavior in public buildings during a fire. A method for evaluating the effectiveness of organizing the evacuation of people from a public building is proposed, which makes it possible to take into account the spread of panic among evacuees. The method is based on the development of an evacuation simulation model that takes into account the impact of certain factors on the degree of people's panic, which implements an agent-based approach. The proposed method allows, when describing the psycho-emotional behavior of each agent separately in the process of evacuation, to evaluate the effectiveness of organizing the evacuation of the crowd as a whole. The simulation results on the example of a shopping and entertainment center show that possible panic conditions of evacuees can affect the efficiency of evacuation.

Keywords: evacuation, panic, simulation model, efficiency assessment method, shopping and entertainment complex, agent-based approach