Dwell Time Planning for Break Areas to Facilitate Informal Communication

Abstract In recent years, as the working styles of office workers have changed, so have the functions expected of offices. The importance of informal communication in the office has been highlighted, and various spatial and furniture designs, as well as initiatives to promote such communication, have been proposed. However, a major challenge has been the lack of quantitative evaluation and forecasting methods. Therefore, this study focuses on break areas in offices and proposes a design method for dwell time to promote informal communication. A multi-agent simulation is conducted to mimic the floor structure and worker behavior of a real office, and the time spent in the break area required for a given number of encounters between workers. In building the behavior model, data assimilation was performed by extracting worker movement frequencies and routes based on observational data in the real office environment. The simulation results were compared with the results of actual observations of people flows to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.