ITcon Vol. 27, pg. 781-801, http://www.itcon.org/2022/38

Status quo and challenges and future development of fire emergency evacuation research and application in built environment

DOI:10.36680/j.itcon.2022.038
submitted:January 2022
revised:July 2022
published:August 2022
editor(s):Amor R
authors:Aiyin Jiang, Ph.D.,
University of North Florida;
a.jiang@unf.edu

Yunjeong Mo, Ph.D.,
Iowa State University;
ymo@iastate.edu

Vamsi Sai Kalasapudi, Ph.D.,
University of North Florida
vamsi.kalasapudi@unf.edu
summary:Fire emergency evacuation study has been conducted for decades. In recent two decades, the fire emergency evacuation studies have been incorporating new technologies due to the high demands on efficient and safe evacuation for occupants who have various needs. The proposed fire emergency evacuation system from academic research and solutions from industry practices adopt different technologies to serve various evacuees. Therefore, this study conducts literature review to understand the status quo of current fire emergency evacuation research and practice. It shows that fire emergency evacuation studies mainly focus on the facility operation stage instead of design and construction stages. The facilities include residential buildings, education buildings, subways, shopping centers, etc. Three critical factors affect efficient and safe fire emergency evacuation in a built environment – facility physical features, fire characteristics, and human behavior. This study categories these new technologies, which are incorporated into the fire emergency evacuation research and practices within the recent two decades, into four groups: (1) Facility geometrical analysis, which includes the technologies such as BIM, GIS, VR and the combination of BIM/GIS/VR (2) Fire and smoke simulation, e.g. FDS and Pyrosim. The simulation output such as fire and smoke dynamics is incorporated into intelligent fire evacuation system (3) Crowd evacuation simulation software, e.g. Pathfinder, Massmotion; the output of simulation is used to develop personalized evacuation system (4) Indoor positioning system and mobile device/IoT technology to track and evacuate occupants intelligently. This study presents these new technologies used in the fire emergency evacuation systems and indicates that the development of an intelligent and personalized emergency evacuation system, which may track the evacuees in real time, is the future research trend.
keywords:fire emergency evacuation, building information modeling, geographical information system, fire simulation, evacuation simulation
full text: (PDF file, 0.766 MB)
citation:Jiang A, Mo Y, Kalasapudi V S (2022). Status quo and challenges and future development of fire emergency evacuation research and application in built environment, ITcon Vol. 27, pg. 781-801, https://doi.org/10.36680/j.itcon.2022.038
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