Building Fire Evacuation: An IoT-Aided Perspective in the 5G Era

Complex and tall buildings have been constructed in many cities recently. Fire safety should be a major concern of building designers, engineers, and governments. Previous fire experience has made us understand the importance of acquiring fire-ground information to facilitate firefighting operations, evacuation processes, rescues, etc. Recently, the rapid advancement in Information Technology, Data Analytics, and other detection and monitoring systems has provided the basis for fire safety researchers to re-think fire safety strategies in the built environment. Amongst all fire safety studies, evacuation in tall buildings, including elevator evacuations, has attracted much attention. IoT-aided building fire evacuation is a new concept of the building evacuation mode, which improves the building evacuation process by making decisions of escape based on the real-time fire-ground information, such as the fire environment and occupant situations. Focusing on IoT applications in building fire evacuation, this paper explores the advantages and insufficiencies of current smart building fire evacuation systems. A conceptual design of an IoT-aided building fire evacuation control system is described. The system is introduced in the sequence of information needs, information sources and data transmission, and potential services and applications. Finally, new insights into promising 5G technologies for future building fire evacuations are discussed.

Virtual Fire Evacuation Drills through a Web-Based Serious Game

Evacuation capacity is very important in building fire. In order to improve the safety evacuation capacity of occupants, a web-based serious game for virtual fire evacuation drills is proposed. As a prototype of the serious game, a stand-alone system for virtual drill had been developed. On this basis, the system framework of the serious game is first designed for web-based training, including the database, front and back ends. Secondly, an optimization solution including fire scenes and web codes is designed for smooth rendering performance. Lastly, a solution is designed to visualize the evacuation paths of numerous trainees, which can be used to reveal the evacuation rules, and an evaluation model of evacuation performance is created considering the features of evacuation paths and fire hazards, to provide comprehensive feedback for trainees. Thus, a convenient and accessible web-based serious game was developed. More than 100 people participated in the online virtual evacuation drill of a dormitory building fire. Through the drills, the average evacuation time of the trainees decreases from 79.77 s to 54.32 s, and the safety scores of the trainees improve from 74.71 to 81.21. Therefore, the evacuation abilities of trainees gradually improve, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the drill. Consequently, virtual fire drills using a web-based serious game can play an important role in improving the evacuation ability.

Study on the Effect of Spatial Cognition Methods on Indoor Emergency Evacuation

In building fire emergencies,way-finding capabilities can affect people's evacuation efficiency and chances of survival.The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of spatial cognitive methods on people's way-finding ability.In this research, we used VR technology to conduct experiments. In an immersive virtual environment,64 participants were asked to actively explore virtual malls by using YAH navigation and paper maps to find destinations and complete buying tasks,respectively.After that,32 participants needed to alienate the virtual mall with a time limit,while the else had to complete the same task without a time limit. In the experiment,the participants were exposed to the environment for the first time and were unfamiliar with it.The results showed that participants using paper maps walked longer(710 m vs 932 m) and took more time(666 s vs 922 s) to complete tasks of evacuating the mall than those who used YAH navigation maps.The findings also showed that participants spent more time(521 s vs 790 s)looking for exits under time constraints and found evacuation tasks more difficult.This article discusses the mechanisms of these findings.