Evaluation and Optimization of Secondary School Laboratory Layout Based on Simulation of Students’ Evacuation Behavior

Optimizing the furniture layout of middle school laboratories is crucial for improving the emergency safety, operational efficiency, and resilience of teaching buildings. This study used AnyLogic software to model and simulate pedestrian evacuation behavior in a typical middle school laboratory layout. In a standardized laboratory (90.75 m2), we constructed a behavior-oriented multi-agent evacuation model. The model incorporated key student parameters, including shoulder width (312–416 mm), walking speed (1.5–2.5 m/s), and reaction time (10–15 s). To ensure comparability between different layouts, the number of evacuees was fixed at 48. Evacuation performance was evaluated based on total evacuation time, spatial density, and detour distance. The results showed that the hybrid layout achieved the shortest evacuation time (28.0 s), which was 10.3% shorter than the island layout (31.2 s) and 34.7% shorter than the parallel layout (42.9 s). The hybrid layout also had a shorter average detour distance (9.78 m) and the lowest path variability (coefficient of variation CV = 0.33), indicating a more balanced evacuation load and a smaller bottleneck effect. Overall, these findings provide evidence-based recommendations for improving laboratory safety, space utilization, and behavioral adaptability, and provide a quantitative reference for updating educational building codes, school laboratory construction standards, and guidelines for laboratory furniture and safety facility configuration.