BIM-BASED IMMERSIVE EVACUATION SIMULATIONS

The changed global security situation in the last eight years has shown the importance of emergency management plans in public buildings. Therefore, the use of computer simulators for surveying fire safety design and evacuation process is increasing. The aim of these simulators is to have more realistic evacuation simulations. The challenge is, firstly, to realize the virtual simulation environment based on geometrical and material boundary conditions, secondly, to considerate the mutual interaction effects between different parameters and, finally, to have a realistic visualization of the simulated results. In order to carry out this task, an especial new software method on a BIM-platform has to be developed which can integrate all required simulations and will be able to have an immersive output BIM ISEE (Immersive Safety Engineering Environment). The new BIM-ISEE will integrate the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) for fire and evacuation simulation in the Autodesk Revit which is a BIM-platform and will represent the simulation results in the immersive virtual environment at the institute (CES-Lab). With BIM-ISEE the fire safety engineer will be able to obtain more realistic visualizations in the immersive environment, to modify his concept more effectively, to evaluate the simulation results more accurately and to visualize the various simulation results. It can also give the rescue staff the opportunity to perform and evaluate emergency evacuation trainings

Multimodal virtual environments: an opportunity to improve fire safety training?

Fires and fire-related fatalities remain a tragic and frequent occurrence. Evidence has shown that humans adopt sub-optimal behaviours during fire incidents and, therefore, training is one possible means to improve occupant survival rates. We present the potential benefits of using Virtual Environment Training (VET) for fire evacuation. These include experiential and active learning, the ability to interact with contexts which would be dangerous to experience in real life, the ability to customise training and scenarios to the learner, and analytics on learner performance. While several studies have investigated fire safety in VET, generally with positive outcomes, challenges related to cybersickness, interaction and content creation remain. Moreover, issues such as lack of behavioural realism have been attributed to the lack realistic sensory feedback. We argue for multimodal (visual, audio, olfactory, heat) virtual fire safety training to address limitations with existing simulators, and ultimately improve the outcomes of fire incidents. © 2020, Institution of Occupational Safety and Health

Proyecto Avanti: sistema de asistencia a la evacuación de incendios

Sobre AVANTI El soporte a las técnicas de evacuación en caso de incendio es un campo que todavía puede beneficiarse mucho de los últimos avances en tecnología, y particularmente en Inteligencia Ambiente (Ambient Intelligence), una evolución natural de lo que la década pasada se conoció como Computación Ubicua (Ubiquitous Computing). Se entende por este término la integración de la informática en el entorno de la persona, de forma que los ordenadores no se perciban como objetos diferenciados. Su objetivo es insertar dispositivos inteligentes tanto en el entorno como en apartados de uso diario, para que las personas puedan interactuar con ellos de una manera natural y desinhibida en todo tipo de situaciones y circunstancias. En nuestro caso, los ensayos de evacuación se venían llevando a cabo sin ningún soporte informático. Un sencillo procedimiento de “levántase y vaya hacia la salida” que en el mejor de los casos tan sólo era molesto para el que lo practicaba, obligándole a dejar sus quehaceres y dirigirse durante 5 minutos a la puerta de salida, sin posibilidad de poder mejorar en sus errores o de sentirse motivados. Utilizando como escenario la Facultad de Informática, presentamos formalmente AVANTI. El proyecto trata de aportar una plataforma intuitiva pero completa y potente para usar durante los ensayos de evacuación. Combinando posicionamiento WiFi donde el GPS no llega, predicción de movimiento gracias a los sensores que proporcionan los terminales Android y Realidad Aumentada, para poder contribuir a una experiencia más visual y estimuladora, AVANTI intenta contribuir a que los ensayos de incendio puedan ser informatizados. Estudiantes e instructores puedan analizar fácilmente fallos en los protocolos a seguir, y que llegada la situación de un incendio los ensayos puedan cumplir su objetivo: ser eficaces, y evitar que ningún miembro de la Facultad de Informática sufra daños personales. Nuestra desarrollo ha dado lugar a la publicación de una contribución en la conferencia UcamI’10 Sobre este documento El documento se encuentra organizado en cuatro grandes secciones, que aglutinan y organizan las distintas partes de la memoria. La primera sección es la introducción, en la que se hace un resumen de la problemática que se intenta resolver, de la aplicación y del estado del arte en los distintos campos que atañen a AVANTI. La segunda sección trata más a detalle el producto. Se describe la arquitectura modular y funcional de AVANTI, entrando en detalle en cada uno de sus componentes. La tercera sección define el proceso que se ha llevado a cabo para desarrollar el producto, formalizada según las distintas propuestas de Pressman [Press05] para metodología de desarrollo de software. La cuarta sección, conclusiones, evalúa los resultados obtenidos y aporta información relativa a las pruebas, estadísticas y apéndices de la aplicación, así como la bibliografía utilizada y en la que nos hemos basado para poder analizar la problemática desde el comienzo de este proyecto. El documento en su práctica totalidad (salvo las secciones que la normativa establece) ha sido escrito en castellano por motivos prácticos. Los contenidos abarcan prácticamente todo el ciclo de desarrollo de AVANTI; así como un análisis previo de la problemática de nuestro problema, sistemas existentes y cómo hemos intentado puentear todas las alternativas para poder solucionar nuestra problemática concreta. Sobre AVANTI hemos redactado aspectos técnicos de ingeniería del software, como manuales de usuario, descripciones, capturas de pantalla de la aplicación, etc. [ABSTRACT] About AVANTI Technical support for evacuation protocols in fire situations is an area that can still greatly benefit from the latest advances in technology, particularly in Ambient Intelligence (AmI), a natural evolution of what the last decade became known as Ubiquitous Computing (UC). This term could be understood as the integration of information technology in the person's environment, so that computers are not seen as separate objects. Its goal is to insert smart devices on both the environment and in everyday devices, in order to enable people to interact with them in a natural and uninhibited manner in all situations and circumstances. In the case of our Computer Science School, the evacuation tests were being carried out without computer support. Just by a simple "get up and go to exit" procedure, which at best was only valid to upset the user for loosing his time and stop his tasks for 5 minutes. The fire evacuation drills did not encourage the motivation on the user, and did not provide any feedback mechanism to correct his owns errors or improve the last trajectores of scape. Using the scenario of the Computer Science School from the Complutense University, we proudly introduce AVANTI. The project aims to provide an intuitive but comprehensive and powerful platform to use during evacuation drills. Combining wireless positioning where GPS has not come, motion prediction using the Androidpowered sensors and Augmented Reality in order to provide a more visual and stimulating experience, AVANTI attempts to contribute to the computerization of the fire evacuation drills, to help students and instructors to easily detect failures in the designed protocols, and when the situation of fire in the building happens, the drills can accomplish their goals: to be effective, and to prevent any member of the Computer Science School to suffer personal injuries. Our work has lead into the publicacion of a paper in the UCamI’10 conference About this document This document is organized into four sections, which organize the different parts of memory. The first section is the introduction, which provides a summary of the problem we have been trying to solve, the application and the state of the art in different fields regarding AVANTI. The second section deals more in detail with the product. We describe the architecture and the modular functionality of AVANTI,going into detail on each of its components. The third section defines the process that has been carried out to develop the product, formalized according to the different proposals from Pressman [Press05] for software development. The fourth section, the conclusions, evaluates the results and provides information concerning the tests, statistics of the application, appendix and the bibliography we have used in order to analyze the problematic we were trying to solve since the beginning of this project. The paper is almost entirely written in Spanish, for practical reasons. Contents cover practically the entire development cycle of AVANTI, as well as a previous analysis of the faced problems, existing systems and how we tried to bypass all the alternatives to solve our specific problems. Regarding AVANTI we have written about the technical aspects of software engineering, user manuals, descriptions, screenshots of the application, etc

Metaverse Perspectives from Japan: A Participatory Speculative Design Case Study

Currently, the development of the metaverse lies in the hands of industry. Citizens have little influence on this process. Instead, to do justice to the pluralism of (digital) societies, we should strive for an open discourse including many different perspectives on the metaverse and its core technologies such as AI. We utilize a participatory speculative design (PSD) approach to explore Japanese citizens' perspectives on future metaverse societies, as well as social and ethical implications. Our contributions are twofold. Firstly, we demonstrate the effectiveness of PSD in engaging citizens in critical discourse on emerging technologies like the metaverse, offering our workshop framework as a methodological contribution. Secondly, we identify key themes from participants' perspectives, providing insights for culturally sensitive design and development of virtual environments. Our analysis shows that participants imagine the metaverse to have the potential to solve a variety of societal issues; for example, breaking down barriers of physical environments for communication, social interaction, crisis preparation, and political participation, or tackling identity-related issues. Regarding future metaverse societies, participants' imaginations raise critical questions about human-AI relations, technical solutionism, politics and technology, globalization and local cultures, and immersive technologies. We discuss implications and contribute to expanding conversations on metaverse developments

Virtual Reality och människors beteende vid brand

The aim of this study is to investigate whether a virtual environment can be used as a complement to conventional experiments regarding human behaviour in fires and evacuations. Initially, a study of previous research in the field of human behaviour in fires and Virtual Reality was performed. To be able to do a validation of the use of Virtual Reality in relation to conventional experiments, a previous experiment with a smoke-filled exercise tunnel was recreated as a virtual environment. The experiments in the virtual environment in this study were designed as close to the original experiments as was possible with the available resources and experience of the authors. In total, 46 subjects participated in the experiments on September 24th to 28th 2012. Qualitative engineering judgments and statistical comparisons were made on a number of aspects, regarding movement paths and behaviour, in the experiments in this study and the ones in the original study. These statistical tests could not show any significant differences between the two studies. The combination of survey answers and statistical tests is considered to show that there is potential in further using Virtual Reality as a tool to study human behaviour in fires

Integrated evaluation of air flow and gas dispersion for underground station safety strategies based on subway climatology

PhD ThesisRail underground systems are seen as a way to overcome traffic congestion in city environments. Many new subways are being built in China and developing countries. Recent studies have however shown that the ventilation of subway systems is poorly understood. There is significant danger to life if a fire occurs or toxins such as chemical or biological agents are released in a subway. Understanding the air flow inside a subway and how this is affected by the local environment is key in establishing effective evacuation strategies. A series of tracer gas experiments conducted as part of this research have been carried out. To expand the subway climatology from an experimental framework into a virtual and simulation environment, 3D Computational Fluid Dynamic models have been developed, which include the simulation of local microclimate and air movement inside the station respectively. The station CFD model has allowed the analysis of the air flow inside the station under the prevailing external weather condition. Results show promising links between external climatic factors, the subway climatology and the ability to predict the dispersal of smoke/toxins. The local weather pattern has a large influence on the background airflow inside a station and dominated the flow direction at station exits which is been used to evaluate the efficiency of pedestrian evacuation and also determine the safer evacuation route and exit. The possibilities of integrating these findings will allow for a more holistic safety assessment to be carried out that could reduce the loss of life or mitigate harmful effects on public health. It also fills a knowledge gap in design guidelines from a safety perspective underground station construction and ventilation

Geometric, Semantic, and System-Level Scene Understanding for Improved Construction and Operation of the Built Environment

Recent advances in robotics and enabling fields such as computer vision, deep learning, and low-latency data passing offer significant potential for developing efficient and low-cost solutions for improved construction and operation of the built environment. Examples of such potential solutions include the introduction of automation in environment monitoring, infrastructure inspections, asset management, and building performance analyses. In an effort to advance the fundamental computational building blocks for such applications, this dissertation explored three categories of scene understanding capabilities: 1) Localization and mapping for geometric scene understanding that enables a mobile agent (e.g., robot) to locate itself in an environment, map the geometry of the environment, and navigate through it; 2) Object recognition for semantic scene understanding that allows for automatic asset information extraction for asset tracking and resource management; 3) Distributed coupling analysis for system-level scene understanding that allows for discovery of interdependencies between different built-environment processes for system-level performance analyses and response-planning. First, this dissertation advanced Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) techniques for convenient and low-cost locating capabilities compared with previous work. To provide a versatile Real-Time Location System (RTLS), an occupancy grid mapping enhanced visual SLAM (vSLAM) was developed to support path planning and continuous navigation that cannot be implemented directly on vSLAM’s original feature map. The system’s localization accuracy was experimentally evaluated with a set of visual landmarks. The achieved marker position measurement accuracy ranges from 0.039m to 0.186m, proving the method’s feasibility and applicability in providing real-time localization for a wide range of applications. In addition, a Self-Adaptive Feature Transform (SAFT) was proposed to improve such an RTLS’s robustness in challenging environments. As an example implementation, the SAFT descriptor was implemented with a learning-based descriptor and integrated into a vSLAM for experimentation. The evaluation results on two public datasets proved the feasibility and effectiveness of SAFT in improving the matching performance of learning-based descriptors for locating applications. Second, this dissertation explored vision-based 1D barcode marker extraction for automated object recognition and asset tracking that is more convenient and efficient than the traditional methods of using barcode or asset scanners. As an example application in inventory management, a 1D barcode extraction framework was designed to extract 1D barcodes from video scan of a built environment. The performance of the framework was evaluated with video scan data collected from an active logistics warehouse near Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW), demonstrating its applicability in automating inventory tracking and management applications. Finally, this dissertation explored distributed coupling analysis for understanding interdependencies between processes affecting the built environment and its occupants, allowing for accurate performance and response analyses compared with previous research. In this research, a Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM)-based distributed coupling analysis framework and a message wrapper were designed. This proposed framework and message wrapper were tested with analysis models from wind engineering and structural engineering, where they demonstrated the abilities to link analysis models from different domains and reveal key interdependencies between the involved built-environment processes.PHDCivil EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/155042/1/lichaox_1.pd

Forum Bauinformatik 2009 : 23. bis 25. September 2009, Universität Karlsruhe (TH)

Tagungsband des 21. Forum Bauinformatik am 23. bis 25. September 2009 an der Universität Karlsruhe (TH). Beiträge von jungen Wissenschaftlern aus den Bereichen Simulationsmodelle, Numerische Methoden, Visualisierung, Informationsvermittlung, Prozess- und Produktmodellierung sowie weiterer informationstechnischer Anwendungen im Bauwesen