scholarly journals An Experimental Test Proposal to Study Human Behaviour in Fires Using Virtual Environments

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (12) ◽  
pp. 3607 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos de Lama ◽  
Cristina González-Gaya ◽  
Alberto Sánchez-Lite
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Emergency Situation ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Average Delay ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Audio Communication ◽  
Critical Phases

Human 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 them.

scholarly journals Comparison of Factorial and Latin Hypercube Sampling Designs for Meta-Models of Building Heating and Cooling Loads

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 512
Author(s):  
Younhee Choi ◽  
Doosam Song ◽  
Sungmin Yoon ◽  
Junemo Koo
Keyword(s):  
Latin Hypercube Sampling ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Gain Coefficient ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Latin Hypercube ◽  
Heating And Cooling ◽  
Factor Design ◽  
Heating Loads ◽  
Cooling Loads ◽  
Interest In Research

Interest in research analyzing and predicting energy loads and consumption in the early stages of building design using meta-models has constantly increased in recent years. Generally, it requires many simulated or measured results to build meta-models, which significantly affects their accuracy. In this study, Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) is proposed as an alternative to Fractional Factor Design (FFD), since it can improve the accuracy while including the nonlinear effect of design parameters with a smaller size of data. Building energy loads of an office floor with ten design parameters were selected as the meta-models’ objectives, and were developed using the two sampling methods. The accuracy of predicting the heating/cooling loads of the meta-models for alternative floor designs was compared. For the considered ranges of design parameters, window insulation (WDI) and Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) were found to have nonlinear characteristics on cooling and heating loads. LHS showed better prediction accuracy compared to FFD, since LHS considers the nonlinear impacts for a given number of treatments. It is always a good idea to use LHS over FFD for a given number of treatments, since the existence of nonlinearity in the relation is not pre-existing information.

Closed-Form Correlation of Buildings Energy Use With Key Design Parameters Calibrated Using a Genetic Algorithm

2011 ◽  
Vol 133 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raed I. Bourisli ◽  
Adnan A. AlAnzi
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithm ◽  
Closed Form ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Variable Function ◽  
Real Coded Genetic Algorithm ◽  
The Difference

This work aims at developing a closed-form correlation between key building design variables and its energy use. The results can be utilized during the initial design stages to assess the different building shapes and designs according to their expected energy use. Prototypical, 20-floor office buildings were used. The relative compactness, footprint area, projection factor, and window-to-wall ratio were changed and the resulting buildings performances were simulated. In total, 729 different office buildings were developed and simulated in order to provide the training cases for optimizing the correlation’s coefficients. Simulations were done using the VisualDOE TM software with a Typical Meteorological Year data file, Kuwait City, Kuwait. A real-coded genetic algorithm (GA) was used to optimize the coefficients of a proposed function that relates the energy use of a building to its four key parameters. The figure of merit was the difference in the ratio of the annual energy use of a building normalized by that of a reference building. The objective was to minimize the difference between the simulated results and the four-variable function trying to predict them. Results show that the real-coded GA was able to come up with a function that estimates the thermal performance of a proposed design with an accuracy of around 96%, based on the number of buildings tested. The goodness of fit, roughly represented by R2, ranged from 0.950 to 0.994. In terms of the effects of the various parameters, the area was found to have the smallest role among the design parameters. It was also found that the accuracy of the function suffers the most when high window-to-wall ratios are combined with low projection factors. In such cases, the energy use develops a potential optimum compactness. The proposed function (and methodology) will be a great tool for designers to inexpensively explore a wide range of alternatives and assess them in terms of their energy use efficiency. It will also be of great use to municipality officials and building codes authors.

scholarly journals Mobile Application Design Emergency Medical Call for the Deaf using UCD Method

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Risald Risald ◽  
Suyoto Suyoto ◽  
Albertus Joko Santoso
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Emergency Situation ◽  
Emergency Call ◽  
Medical Emergency ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
User Centered Design ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
The People ◽  
Emergency Event ◽  
Audio Communication

<p>Deaf or hearing loss is a condition of inability to hear something, either totally or partially. Hearing loss greatly affects the life of a person in communicating with the people around him. Deaf people will be very difficult when in a medical emergency, this is because the medical emergency situation requires fast action.</p><p>          The Healthy Phone application is a mobile medical emergency call application that can help people with hearing impaired when in emergency situations. With the Healthy Phone application, the user only needs to select an icon that suits the situation encountered in touchscreen mobile device then the message will be sent to the nearest hospital.</p>                To search for icons corresponding to emergencies, the User Centered Design (UCD) method is used. This application is very helpful for deaf people because this application does not require audio communication and user location is also sent automatically to the nearest hospital. The results were analyzed using four emergency event scenarios with a total score of 87% and an average user time of less than 0:42 sec indicating that the study was successful in designing a mobile medical emergency call application according to user requirements.

Impact of building design parameters precision on heating and cooling load calculations

2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 741-749
Author(s):  
Sajad Abasnezhad ◽  
Nima Soltani ◽  
Elin Markarian ◽  
Hamed Aghabalayi Fakhim ◽  
Hamed Khezerloo
Keyword(s):  
Building Design ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Cooling Load ◽  
Heating And Cooling ◽  
Heating And Cooling Load

scholarly journals BIM Enabled Approach for Performance-Based Design

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Renas K.M. Sherko ◽  
Yusuf Arayici ◽  
Mike Kagioglou
Keyword(s):  
Technology Use ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Performance Based Design ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Performance Parameters ◽  
Efficient Design ◽  
Architectural Practice ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
And Performance

A significant amount of energy is consumed by buildings due to ineffective design decisions with little consideration for energy efficiency. Yet, performance parameters should be considered during the early design phase, which is vital for improved energy performance and lower CO2 emissions. BIM, as a new way of working methodology, can help for performance-based design. However, it is still infancy in architectural practice about how BIM can be used to develop energy efficient design. Thus, the aim is to propose a strategic framework to guide architects about how to do performance-based design considering the local values and energy performance parameters. The research adopts a multi case study approach to gain qualitative and quantitative insights into the building energy performance considering the building design parameters. The outcome is a new design approach and protocol to assist designers to successfully use BIM for design optimization, PV technology use in design, rules-based design and performance assessment scheme reflecting local values.

scholarly journals The Significance of Sky Temperature in the Assessment of the Thermal Performance of Buildings

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (22) ◽  
pp. 8057 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aiman Albatayneh ◽  
Dariusz Alterman ◽  
Adrian Page ◽  
Behdad Moghtaderi
Keyword(s):  
Air Temperature ◽  
Thermal Performance ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Accurate Estimation ◽  
Brick Veneer ◽  
Simulation Error ◽  
Sky Temperature ◽  
The Impact

Energy-efficient building design needs an accurate way to estimate temperature inside the building which facilitates the calculation of heating and cooling energy requirements in order to achieve appropriate thermal comfort for occupants. Sky temperature is an important factor for any building assessment tool which needs to be precisely determined for accurate estimation of the energy requirement. Many building simulation tools have been used to calculate building thermal performance such as Autodesk Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, which can be used to calculate building internal air temperature but requires sky temperature as a key input factor for the simulation. Real data obtained from real-sized house modules located at University of Newcastle, Australia (southern hemisphere), were used to find the impact of different sky temperatures on the building’s thermal performance using CFD simulation. Various sky temperatures were considered to determine the accurate response which aligns with a real trend of buildings’ internal air temperature. It was found that the internal air temperature in a building keeps either rising or decreasing if higher or lower sky temperature is chosen. This significantly decreases the accuracy of the simulation. It was found that using the right sky temperature values for each module, Cavity Brick Module (CB) Insulated Cavity Brick Module (InsCB), Insulated Brick Veneer Module (InsBV) and Insulated Reverse Brick Veneer Module (InsRBV), will result in 6.5%, 7.1%, 6.2% and 6.4% error correspondingly compared with the real data. These errors mainly refer to the simulation error. On the other hand using higher sky temperatures by +10 °C will significantly increase the simulation error to 16.5%, 17.5%, 17.1% and 16.8% and lower sky temperature by +10 °C will also increase the error to 19.3%, 22.6%, 21.9% and 19.1% for CB, InsCB, InsBV and InsRBV modules, respectively.

scholarly journals Tools for BIM-GIS Integration (IFC Georeferencing and Conversions): Results from the GeoBIM Benchmark 2019

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Noardo ◽  
Lars Harrie ◽  
Ken Arroyo Ohori ◽  
Filip Biljecki ◽  
Claire Ellul ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Building Design ◽  
Reference Standards ◽  
Data Conversion ◽  
3D City Models ◽  
Building Permits ◽  
Information Models ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Building Information ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
City Models

The integration of 3D city models with Building Information Models (BIM), coined as GeoBIM, facilitates improved data support to several applications, e.g., 3D map updates, building permits issuing, detailed city analysis, infrastructure design, context-based building design, to name a few. To solve the integration, several issues need to be tackled and solved, i.e., harmonization of features, interoperability, format conversions, integration of procedures. The GeoBIM benchmark 2019, funded by ISPRS and EuroSDR, evaluated the state of implementation of tools addressing some of those issues. In particular, in the part of the benchmark described in this paper, the application of georeferencing to Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) models and making consistent conversions between 3D city models and BIM are investigated, considering the OGC CityGML and buildingSMART IFC as reference standards. In the benchmark, sample datasets in the two reference standards were provided. External volunteers were asked to describe and test georeferencing procedures for IFC models and conversion tools between CityGML and IFC. From the analysis of the delivered answers and processed datasets, it was possible to notice that while there are tools and procedures available to support georeferencing and data conversion, comprehensive definition of the requirements, clear rules to perform such two tasks, as well as solid technological solutions implementing them, are still lacking in functionalities. Those specific issues can be a sensible starting point for planning the next GeoBIM integration agendas.

scholarly journals Evolution Model for Epidemic Diseases Based on the Kaplan-Meier Curve Determination

Mathematics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (8) ◽  
pp. 1260
Author(s):  
Jose M. Calabuig ◽  
Luis M. García-Raffi ◽  
Albert García-Valiente ◽  
Enrique A. Sánchez-Pérez
Keyword(s):  
Real Data ◽  
Local Minima ◽  
Global Minima ◽  
Huge Number ◽  
Quadratic Error ◽  
Kaplan Meier ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Curve Determination ◽  
Epidemic Diseases

We show a simple model of the dynamics of a viral process based, on the determination of the Kaplan-Meier curve P of the virus. Together with the function of the newly infected individuals I, this model allows us to predict the evolution of the resulting epidemic process in terms of the number E of the death patients plus individuals who have overcome the disease. Our model has as a starting point the representation of E as the convolution of I and P. It allows introducing information about latent patients—patients who have already been cured but are still potentially infectious, and re-infected individuals. We also provide three methods for the estimation of P using real data, all of them based on the minimization of the quadratic error: the exact solution using the associated Lagrangian function and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, a Monte Carlo computational scheme acting on the total set of local minima, and a genetic algorithm for the approximation of the global minima. Although the calculation of the exact solutions of all the linear systems provided by the use of the Lagrangian naturally gives the best optimization result, the huge number of such systems that appear when the time variable increases makes it necessary to use numerical methods. We have chosen the genetic algorithms. Indeed, we show that the results obtained in this way provide good solutions for the model.

scholarly journals Supporting Soundscape Design in Virtual Environments with Content-based Audio Retrieval

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Janer
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
3D Models ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Principal Characteristics ◽  
Computer Assisted Design ◽  
Audio Retrieval ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
On Line ◽  
The Creation

The computer-assisted design of soundscapes for virtual environments has received far less attention than the creation of graphical content. In this “think piece” we briefly introduce the principal characteristics of a framework under development that aims towards the creation of an automatic sonification of virtual worlds. As a starting point, the proposed system is based on an on-line collaborative sound repository that, together with content-based audio retrieval tools, assists the search of sounds to be associated with 3D models or scenes.

scholarly journals Development of a user-friendly regression model to evaluate carbon emissions of office buildings design in the subtropics

Facilities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (11/12) ◽  
pp. 860-878
Author(s):  
Pan Lee ◽  
Edwin H.W. Chan ◽  
Queena K. Qian ◽  
Patrick T.I. Lam
Keyword(s):  
Regression Model ◽  
Carbon Emissions ◽  
Building Design ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Content Type ◽  
High Rise ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Influential Parameters

Purpose Design teams have difficulties in assessing building carbon emissions at an early stage, as most building energy simulation tools require a detailed input of building design for estimation. The purpose of this paper is to develop a user-friendly regression model to estimate carbon emissions of the preliminary design of office buildings in the subtropics by way of example. Five sets of building design parameters, including building configuration, building envelope, design space conditions, building system configuration and occupant behaviour, are considered in this study. Design/methodology/approach Both EnergyPlus and Monte Carlo simulation were used to predict carbon emissions for different combinations of the design parameters. A total of 100,000 simulations were conducted to ensure a full range of simulation results. Based on the simulation results, a regression model was developed to estimate carbon emissions of office buildings based on preliminary design information. Findings The results show that occupant density, annual mean occupancy rate, equipment load, lighting load and chiller coefficient of performance are the top five influential parameters affecting building carbon emissions under the subtropics. Besides, the design parameters of ten office buildings were input into this user-friendly regression model for validation. The results show that the ranking of its simulated carbon emissions for these ten buildings is consistent with the original carbon emissions ranking. Practical implications With the use of this developed regression model, design teams can not only have a simple and quick estimation of carbon emissions based on the building design information at the conceptual stage but also explore design options by understanding the level of reduction in carbon emissions if a certain building design parameter is changed. The study also provides recommendations on building design to reduce carbon emissions of office buildings. Originality/value Limited research has been conducted to date to investigate how the change of building design affects carbon emissions in the subtropics where four distinct seasons lead to significant variations of outdoor temperature and relative humidity. Previous research also did not emphasise on the impact of high-rise office building designs (e.g. small building footprint, high window-to-wall ratio) on carbon emissions. This paper adds value by identifying the influential parameters affecting carbon emissions for a high-rise office building design and allows a handy estimate of building carbon emissions under the subtropical conditions. The same approach may be used for other meteorological conditions.

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