Fire Emergency Evacuation from a School Building Using an Evolutionary Virtual Reality Platform

In the last few years, modern technologies such as numerical simulations, virtual and augmented reality, and agent-based models represented effective tools to study phenomena, which may not be experimentally reproduced due to costs, inherent hazards, or other constraints (e.g., fire or earthquake emergencies and evacuation from buildings). This paper shows how to integrate a virtual reality platform with numerical simulation tools to reproduce an evolutionary fire emergency scenario. It is computed in real time based on the building information model and a fluid dynamic software. A specific software was also used to simulate in real time the crowd dynamic in the virtual environment during the emergency evacuation process. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology, the emergency fire evacuation process for an existing school building is presented. The results show that the proposed virtual reality-based system can be employed for reproducing fire emergency scenarios. It can be used to help decision-makers to determine emergency plans and to help firefighters as a training tool to simulate emergency evacuation actions.