Key Results:

The visibility of the exit door affected both participants' visual attention and route choices.  People tend to choose the familiar route but are affected by their neighbors in both visual attention and choice. The change in emergency lighting, however, did not significantly influence participants’ route choices. The study helps understand how individuals perceive their surroundings during emergency wayfinding, enriches knowledge of human emergency wayfinding, and holds significant implications for enhancing building design and evacuation planning.

Research goal:

Indoor path networks are the foundation for route planning and navigation during evacuations. However, a way to generate indoor path networks efficiently is missing.

Results:

This study proposed an approach to automatically generate indoor path networks in the Revit BIM platform. The approach is implemented in Revit to automatically generate indoor path networks for an educational building.

Research goal:

A fast evacuation is critical to reduce casualties and injuries during fire emergencies. However, it is difficult for the evacuees to perform reasonable behavior during emergencies. Therefore, a fire evacuation management system with real-time fire conditions and people flow information is necessary for an effective evacuation to reduce fire-caused damage effectively and protect life and property adequately. 

Results:

This study proposed a framework for the real-time fire emergency evacuation management system (RFEEM) based on Building Information Modeling and indoor localization technology. Four modules are incorporated in the proposed system: environmental information evaluation module, people flow information module, dynamic route planning module, and evacuation guidance module. The proposed framework is validated by a pilot study.  

Research goal: 

Human behavior is one of the most important but hard to define factors in emergency escape simulation. An efficient way to collect human behavior during real emergency scenarios is lacking.

Results:

This study proposed a framework to use a cloud-based immersive online game to solicit human behaviors. The framework is validated by a pilot immersive game developed on a small scale.