End user oriented BIM enabled multi-functional virtual environment supporting building emergency planning and evacuation

Relevant research has identified that high level of building emergency casualty (e.g. due to fire) has direct link with the delayed evacuation especially in residential and high-rising buildings. The traditional fire drill can only passively identify some bottleneck for evacuation after the building has been constructed and under its operation stage; and end-users normally lack of means to be effectively involved in the decision making process in the first place (e.g. building emergency planning and design) and lack of cost-effective and convenient means to be well trained about emergency evacuation at later operation stage. Modern building emergency management research has highlighted the need for the effective utilization of dynamically updated building emergency information. Building Information Modelling (BIM) has become the information backbone which can enable integration and collaboration throughout the entire building life cycle. BIM can play a significant role in building emergency management due to its comprehensive and standardized data format and integrated life cycle process. This PhD research aims at developing an end user oriented BIM enabled virtual environment to address several key issues for building emergency evacuation and planning. The focus lies on how to utilize BIM as a comprehensive building information provider to work with virtual reality technology to build an adaptable immersive serious game for complex buildings to provide general end users emergency evacuation training/guides. The contribution lies on the seamless integration between BIM and a serious game based Virtual Reality (VR) environment, which enables effective engagement of end-uses. By doing so potential bottlenecks for existing and new buildings for emergency evacuation can be identified and rectified in a timely and cost-effective manner. The system has been tested for its robustness and functionality against the research hypothesis and research questions, and the results show promising potential to support more effective fire emergency evacuation and planning solutions

An experimental test proposal to study human behaviour in fires using virtual environments

Producción CientíficaHuman behavior in an emergency situation is the starting point for all evacuation planning projects. A better understanding of the decisions made by the occupants during an emergency can help to develop calculation tools that can create more efficient forms of visual and audio communication and implement better procedures for evacuating people. The difficulty in studying human behavior lies in the very nature of emergencies, as they are unpredictable, somewhat exceptional and not reproducible. Fire drills play a role in training emergency teams and building occupants, but they cannot be used to collect real data on people’s behavior unless the drill is so realistic that it could endanger the occupants’ safety. In the procedure described here, through the use of a Virtual Reality device that encompasses all critical phases, including user characterization data before the virtual experience, building design parameters and fire scenario, key variables of human behavior can be recorded in order to evaluate each user’s experience satisfactorily. This research shows that the average delay in starting an evacuation is greater than one minute, that anxiety levels and heart rates increase during a fire and that people do not pay attention to evacuation signals. Further analysis of the quantitative data may also provide the causes for decision-making. The use of devices that create realistic virtual environments is a solution for conducting “what if” tests to study and record the decisions taken by the users who undergo the experience in a way that is completely safe for themFundación MAPFRE y ETSII-Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) de España (2020/ICF01)

VELOS : a VR platform for ship-evacuation analysis

Virtual Environment for Life On Ships (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This article focuses on presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: (i) capability of multiple users’ immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, (ii) real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment events and crowd-behavior parameters, (iii) capability of agents and avatars to move continuously on decks, (iv) integrated framework for both the simplified and advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033 Circular, (v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model suitable for evacuation analysis, (vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specification and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and (vii) post-processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information for the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using three evacuation test cases for a ro–ro passenger ship

Peningkatan Efektivitas Peta Jalur Evakuasi Gedung Bertingkat dengan Menggunakan Virtual Walk Augmented Reality (Studi Kasus : Gedung Teknik Industri ITS)

Pemahaman para pengguna gedung terhadap jalur evakuasi pada gedung bertingkat yang sering mereka gunakan sangat penting diperhatikan. Kecelakaan pada gedung yang dapat terjadi secara tiba-tiba menyebabkan para pangguna gedung harus menemukan jalan keluar menggunakan peta kognitif yang ada di dalam kepala mereka. Peta kognitif tersebut dapat dilatih dengan latihan evakuasi maupun dengan memahami peta evakuasi yang berada di dalam ruangan-ruangan gedung. Namun pada kenyataannya, banyak diantara para pengguna gedung yang tidak memperdulikan keberadaan peta evakuasi tersebut yang dapat disebabkan oleh berbagai hal. Penelitian ini merancang sebuah media edukasi bernama Virtual Walk yang bertujuan sebagai media pembelajaran bagi para pengguna gedung bertingkat mengenai jalur evakuasi yang harus digunakan dengan lebih interaktif. Terdapat beberapa tahapan dalam penelitian ini, diantaranya adalah identifikasi penyebab para pengguna gedung enggan untuk memahami peta evakuasi, perancangan dan pembangunan media edukasi, dan pengujian usabilitas yang melibatkan 30 responden untuk mencoba Virtual Walk. Hasil dari penelitian ini adalah media edukasi virtual berbasis augmented reality yang digunakan untuk membantu para pengguna gedung bertingkat dalam memahami jalur evakuasi. Dalam media edukasi ini digunakan dua buah media, yaitu marker dan juga smartphone. Marker berfungsi seperti barcode yang apabila dipindai maka akan menampilkan objek visual berupa animasi arah evakuasi. Sedangkan smartphone berfungsi sebagai pemindai dan sebagai user interface dalam memahami jalur evakuasi. Proses pembuatan animasi menggunakan software 3ds Max sebagai pembangun model gedung dan Unity sebagai platform untuk menciptakan aplikasi berbasis augmnted reality. Berdasarkan uji usabilitas yang dilakukan, sebanyak 90,28% responden merasa terbantu dengan Virtual Walk dalam memahami peta evakuasi dan sebanyak 27 dari 30 responden mengatakan tertarik untuk mencoba Virtual Walk saat pertama kali ditunjukkan ====================================================================================================== Multi-floor building occupants’ understanding against evacuation route is an important aspect to be considered. Evacuation route is the key for the occupants to escape from hazard when earthquake or fire occurs. A cognitive map will guide the occupants to the assembly point during evacuation. The cognitve map can be trained through understanding the evacuation map. Unfortunately, there are major number of the building occupants who ignoring the maps during the real evacuation drill. This research aims to design a virtual educational media to provide building occupants an easier understanding of evacuation route through an augmented reality based evacuation map. Augmented reality based evacuation map is used as occupants attention catcher and as an effective way to comprehend the map. The media is named Virtual Walk. Several stages are conducted in this research to develop the media. One of the stages is investigating occupants’ ignoring behaviour. The result from this research is the virtual educational media based on augmented reality which can be used to help building occupants to understand evacuation map effectively. The media consists of two main elements, a marker and a camera. Marker is used as a target for camera to be scanned at. Camera works as system processing and user interace to identify the marker position and pattern and to project evacuation route animation on camera display. The process of building Virtual Walk is conducted by combining the objective building model and the evacuation route animation using 3Ds Max and Unity. Based on usability testing with 30 respondents, as many as 90,28% of respondents are satisfied with Virtual Wal

The Cry Wolf Effect in Evacuation: a Game-Theoretic Approach

In today's terrorism-prone and security-focused world, evacuation emergencies, drills, and false alarms are becoming more and more common. Compliance to an evacuation order made by an authority in case of emergency can play a key role in the outcome of an emergency. In case an evacuee experiences repeated emergency scenarios which may be a false alarm (e.g., an evacuation drill, a false bomb threat, etc.) or an actual threat, the Aesop's cry wolf effect (repeated false alarms decrease order compliance) can severely affect his/her likelihood to evacuate. To analyse this key unsolved issue of evacuation research, a game-theoretic approach is proposed. Game theory is used to explore mutual best responses of an evacuee and an authority. In the proposed model the authority obtains a signal of whether there is a threat or not and decides whether to order an evacuation or not. The evacuee, after receiving an evacuation order, subsequently decides whether to stay or leave based on posterior beliefs that have been updated in response to the authority's action. Best-responses are derived and Sequential equilibrium and Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium are used as solution concepts (refining equilibria with the intuitive criterion). Model results highlight the benefits of announced evacuation drills and suggest that improving the accuracy of threat detection can prevent large inefficiencies associated with the cry wolf effect.Comment: To be published in Physica

Simulation-based assessments of fire emergency preparedness and response in virtual reality

The current study aimed at evaluating the prospects of a three-dimensional gas power plant (GPP) simulation in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) environment for fire emergency preparedness and response (EPR). To achieve this aim, the study assessed the possibility of safety situational awareness, evacuation drills and hazard mitigation exercises during a fire emergency simulation scenario. The study likewise evaluated the safety and ergonomics of the environment while addressing this aim. We employed the virtual reality accident causation model (VR-ACM) for the assessment with 54 participants individually in IVR. Participants were grouped into two according to whether they had work experience in engineering or not. The obtained results suggested that IVR can be realistic and safe, with the potential for presenting hazardous scenarios necessary for fire EPR. Furthermore, the results indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in the perceptions of both groups regarding the prospects of IVR towards EPR.© 2021 Central Institute for Labour Protection - National Research Institute (CIOP-PIB). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed