Way finding during fire evacuation; an analysis of unannounced fire drills in a hotel at night (original) (raw)
Related papers
Human behaviour under fire situations in high-rise residential building
International Journal of Building Pathology and Adaptation, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate human behaviour under a situation of fire in high-rise residential buildings and identify the factors that motivate people to evacuate. Design/methodology/approach A literature review was conducted to identify different factors of human behaviour during a situation of fire and identify challenges during the evacuation. Through a mixed research method approach, the paper identifies human background, experience and knowledge with fire safety. The paper discusses the challenges occupants face during evacuation based on previous evacuation experience and what occupants were doing during the fire alarm. Findings The paper has identified the challenges and the factors that affect occupants’ decision during fire emergency in high-rise residential buildings. It is clear from the findings that occupants have limited knowledge and skills on how to deal with fire emergencies. Occupants tend to depend on other evacuation routes. Occupants tend...
International Journal of Human-computer Studies / International Journal of Man-machine Studies, 2010
Human behaviour in fires is mainly studied by incident evaluations and real-life experiments, such as unannounced evacuation drills. The possibilities of virtual reality for studying human behaviour in fires are so far hardly adopted by researchers. Nevertheless, the application of a behavioural assessment and research tool (BART) in virtual reality is expected to be a valuable supplement on the existing research methods. The innovative instrument will be validated by comparing the results of experiments in a virtual environment with results of the same experiments in real life. In this paper some results of case studies on evacuation behaviour in a real hotel building, as well as in a virtual hotel building in BART are given. The participants' route choice, pre-movement time, pre-evacuation behaviour, movement time and evacuation behaviour are part of the analysis in the paper.
Modeling Human Behavior during Building Fires
Evacuation models, including engineering hand calculations and computational tools, are used to evaluate the level of safety provided by buildings during evacuation. Building designs and occupant procedures are based on the results produced from these models, including evacuation time results (i.e., how long building occupants will take to evacuate a building). However, most evacuation models focus primarily on calculating and predicting evacuation movement (i.e., how long will it take an occupant to move from his/her initial position to safety), almost ignoring the prediction of behaviors that occupants perform before and during evacuation movement that can delay their safety (e.g., searching for information, fighting the fire, and helping others). Instead of modeling and predicting behavior of simulated occupants, evacuation models and users often make assumptions and simplifications about occupant behavior (i.e., what people do during evacuations) that can be unrealistic and are likely to produce inaccurate results.
Building safety and human behaviour in fire: A literature review
Fire Safety Journal, 2010
The most crucial aspect of a building's safety in the face of fire is the possibility of safe escape. An important precondition is that its fire safety facilities enable independent and adequate fire response performances by the building's occupants. In practice, it appears that the measures currently required by law do not always provide the support that people in burning buildings need. Consequently, understanding how individuals behave in the case of fire and fire evacuation is essential if we are to bring fire safety measures into line with occupants' needs during an incident. This paper contains a review of the available literature on human behaviour in a fire so far as building safety is concerned. The findings are presented as an overview of the critical factors which determine occupants' fire response performances, namely the characteristics of fire, human beings and buildings. The study highlights that some of the assumptions about the existing paradigm of fire safety in buildings are not consistent with the knowledge set out in the literature. The key observation is that psychonomics appear to have significant influence on occupants' fire response performances. Accordingly, the traditional approach to fire safety will have to be supplemented by scientific knowledge from this field. Hence, there is a need for a new approach to fire safety design in buildings, which is set out herein.
Pre-Evacuation Human Reactions in Fires: An Attribution Analysis Considering Psychological Process
Procedia Engineering, 2013
Through reviewing a large quantity of relevant literature and investigating into a few representative fire cases, some typical preevacuation human behavior under fire situations are discussed and defined preliminary. Furthermore, interactional factors that influence human reactions before evacuation in fires are demonstrated systematically. On the basis of this theory, attribution analysis is also conducted on psychological process to fires of human in pre-evacuation time, which includes the first phase of risk perception and the second one of decision-making, while combining the effects from psychological deviation and culture background. Moreover, a probabilistic description method of pre-evacuation human behavior concerning psychological process in fires is proposed in this paper for an exploration. The results may assist in completing the theory of human psychological reactions and emergency behaviors in preevacuation time of fire situations, and also providing scientific reference for those coping with unconventional emergencies and developing the measures of intervention.
Human Behavior under Fire Situations – A case–study in the Portuguese Society
Among possible emergency situations, those that very likely will mostly affect human behavior are the ones related to fire, due to the many reasons associated with its initiation. The prediction of the human behavior in the reply to a fire situation requires an integrated system that involves the people, the building and the fire. It is expectable that people will answer differently to distinct and varying fire situations, which will depend on a diverse range of factors. This paper summarizes a case-study on the human behavior under fire situations, based on the analysis of data collected through a questionnaire, applied to the Portuguese population nationwide. There were 14 questions related to fire, to which 225 answers were obtained. Within these 225 answers, 50 originated from people that actually experienced or were involved in a fire situation. The study was already able to point out some trends in the behavioral analysis. However, it is not ready to fully support the development of a simulation model capable of estimating the pre-movement time. With this purpose, other questionnaires are being designed, which will be associated with results gathered from the observation of a number of real-life simulated evacuation scenarios. As a continuation the methodological approach devised in this work, and in order to implement validation and calibration techniques, a simulation software tool is being implemented, which combines the state-of-the-art concepts of multi-agent systems and serious games. These two concepts support the implementation of a virtual and interactive environment that will allow for subjects’ behavior to be elicited and classified according to different user profiles. The resulting behavioral patterns, together with results from the first part of this study, will feed the devised model to more accurately validate it.
Time-based capabilities of occupants to escape fires in public buildings
1982
21 3;2 Underlying Behavioral Assumptions 22 3.2.1. Assumptions Relating to the Effect of Door and WAdow_Design Opon Egress_Route Perception 22 3;2;2 Assumptions Relating to the Aftect of Illumination Level Upon Egress Route Identification 23 3;2;3 Assumption Relating_to the Role oeVisual Signage and Directional Information in Egress Route Recognition and the Formation of Emergency Egress Strategies 4 7 Iti 23 TALE OF CONTENTS 3.2.4 ssumptions Retattng to the Ability of Audible and ual Alarm Signals_to EffectiVely Alert Building ceupants to a Fire Threat 3.3 Commentary 3.3.1 Problem_ 3;3.2 utititlyitt BehaVieral Models 3.3.3 Assessment'of Behavibral Assumptions Baseg on the Technical Literature
Data-Collection Approaches for the Study of the Decision-Making Process in Fire Evacuations
This work discusses the research methods associated with the study of human behaviour in emergency situations. The main topic under consideration is the decision-making process during discrete choices concerning fire evacuations. Methodological approaches about data collection on the decision-making process during fire emergencies are reviewed, namely Stated Preference (SP) and Revealed Preference (RP) and a combination of them (SP-off-RP). The pros and cons of these approaches and a cross comparison between them in the context of the research methods in use (i.e. VR experiment, evacuation drills, case studies, etc.) for the study of human behaviour in fire are proposed.
Spatial cognition and wayfinding strategy during building fire
Cognitive Processing, 2006
Simulation of human behavior in space is a powerful research method to advance our understanding of the interaction between people and their environment. It allows for both the examination and testing of models and their underlying theory of cognitive and perceptual phenomena as well as the observation of the system's behavior. This paper outlines the use of specific spatial objects to facilitate escaping from an indoor environment in a crisis situation. To represent and simulate people's processes of wayfinding it is necessary to understand how people immediately make sense of spatial situations while performing a wayfinding task which will occur in a building during fire emergencies. The theoretical outset of the research is the observation that humans show distinct behavioral and cognitive preferences when dealing with wayfinding tasks in dangerous situations. The goal of the research is to organize environmental cues and to use them in decision-making and navigation in an indoor environment in a fire emergency. Construction and inspection of mental representations of spatial environments and exploring these models have been discussed and the proposed computational model tested in an indoor complex building. Initial results verify the reliability of the model.