Spatial cognition and wayfinding strategy during building fire (original) (raw)
Related papers
Agent-Based Simulation of Spatial Cognition and Wayfinding in Building Fire Emergency Evacuation
Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography
There is a need to understand how people and environment react in a fire building emergency. Sometimes in the wayfinding process decision errors may occur mainly based on topological errors of the signage. A situation is critical if a decision about which path to take cannot be made with certainty, especially in a crisis situation. An agent-based simulation of human's behavior in escaping from the fire with due attention to the building's signage and dynamic nature of fire propagation affecting the wayfinding task is outlined in this paper. The hypothesis of the paper is that successful navigation is possible if the agent is able to make the correct decision through well-defined cues in critical cases, so the design of the building signage is evaluated through the agent-based simulation. Construction of mental representations of spatial environment and exploring models in the agentbased simulation have been proposed and a computational model successfully tested in an indoor complex hospital environment in different situations and the evacuation time from the building is computed. The most appropriate signage design resulted in the shortest evacuation time in various situations.
Way finding during fire evacuation; an analysis of unannounced fire drills in a hotel at night
Building and Environment, 2010
Findings in earlier studies on fire evacuation and way finding suggest that building features have influence on evacuation behaviour. For example, way finding is believed to be strongly dependent on the lay-out of the building and seems to be hardly dependent on (escape) route signs. Though some aspects are investigated, it is not discussed at great length. In particular there is little insight in how persons find their escape route, and how this process can be supported with lay-out and design measures has been hardly examined. Thus, there is need for insight in the decision-making processes which evacuees pass through. In this paper are the results presented of 83 evacuation experiments in a hotel building at night. The main focus of the study is on way finding during fire evacuation. In the evacuation experiments we investigated the possible influence of smoke and low placed exit signs on the human fire response performance. The experiments are carried out with a traditional research method, namely the registration and evaluation of unannounced fire drills. The study is conducted as part of the validation of a new research method that makes use of serious gaming. The results of the study suggest that smoke has influence on the route choice: when no smoke is perceptible the majority of the participants escape via the main exit and when smoke blocks the route towards the main exit, the majority of the participants escape via the fire exit. Furthermore, low placed exit signs appear to have a positive influence on the use of the nearest fire exit. The personal feature of prior knowledge of the surroundings (or type of surroundings) is also found to have a positive influence on the use of the nearest fire exit. Self-assessments and interviews after a fire evacuation are found to be a disputable method for research on human behaviour in fire. A real-time observation of the people's behaviour during evacuation is considered to give more reliable results.
Proceedings of the 4t International Symposium on Human Behaviour in Fire, 2009
Within the building evacuation context, wayfinding describes the process in which an individual located within an arbitrarily complex enclosure attempts to find a path which leads them to relative safety, usually the exterior of the enclosure. Within most evacuation modelling tools, wayfinding is completely ignored; agents are either assigned the shortest distance path or use a potential field to find the shortest path to the exits. In this paper a novel wayfinding technique that attempts to represent the manner in which people ...
Multi-Agent Simulation of Wayfinding for Rescue Operation during Building Fire
Recently research on human wayfinding has focused mainly on mental representations rather than processes of wayfinding. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the rationality behind applying multi-agent simulation paradigm to the modeling of rescuer team wayfinding in order to develop computational theory of perceptual wayfinding in crisis situations using image schemata and affordances, which explains how people find a specific destination in an unfamiliar building such as a hospital. The hypothesis of this paper is that successful navigation is possible if the agents are able to make the correct decision through well-defined cues in critical cases, so the design of the building signage is evaluated through the multi-agent-based simulation. In addition, a special case of wayfinding in a building, finding one's way through three hospitals, is used to demonstrate the model. Thereby, total rescue time for rescue operation during building fire is computed. This paper discuses the computed rescue time for various signage localization and provides experimental result for optimization of building signage design. Therefore the most appropriate signage design resulted in the shortest total rescue time in various situations.
Spatial Familiarity and Exit Route Selection in Emergency Egress
Fire Technology, 2019
Familiarity is widely accepted as a key variable for the exit route selection of occupants of a building in emergency egress, but how to evaluate it has not been well researched. In addition, familiarity with general space layout (building familiarity) and familiarity with exits (exit familiarity) are often interchangeably used, which may cause inappropriate understanding of building and occupant characteristics among fire engineers and architects. In the current study, a paper-based survey was conducted to examine the difference between the two familiarities in a six-story library building. The two familiarities were implicitly evaluated by the spatial knowledge of the participants on the locations of restrooms, elevators, stairways for exit purposes in an emergency, and their current location. Sixty-nine valid responses of the participants' spatial knowledge were semi-quantitatively evaluated based upon the accuracy of the answered position against the actual position. The results reveal that the two familiarities are not synonymous and needs to be understood and handled differently in fire engineering. In particular, the location of emergency-only exit stairways was perceived as low as 20% of non-emergency-only stairways; on average, each of the former and latter stairways was perceived by 8 and 33 participants out of 69 participants, respectively. This result raises concerns about the efficacy of the emergency-only-exit concept. The direction of the next destination out of a building was found to be a key factor to determine the travel route within a building where occupants have good familiarity with the building and surrounding places.
Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2021
During evacuation, individual navigation behavior is often dictated by the legibility of evacuation signs and the environmental setting itself. People tend to follow previously-used and known routes (to retrace) rather than follow evacuation signage. This has proven undesirable, even fatal, in emergencies and such behavior calls for a better understanding of the influencing factors. This contribution consists of a virtual reality experiment in which 72 participants evacuated from a hotel building in which the spatial configurations were altered. The tendency to retrace diminished when the evacuation route led through a wider, straight corridor, suggesting that the building's spatial configuration has an important influence on retracing and should be more carefully considered in the design of buildings in and agent-based simulations.
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.
Environmental Modeling: Using Space Syntax in Spatial Cognition Research
2010
The present work aims to investigate the role of 3 factors related to the environmental configuration in emergency wayfinding strategies. In particular, it moves from the results of a previous real-world study in which visibility, in particular, seemed to be the most influent factor in influencing wayfinding strategies. Angular incidence, in turn, played a-minor-role, whereas metrical distance was the less used criterion. These outputs appeared to deserve to be more deeply studied, so that two VR experiment were designed to better control environmental variables and to compare the results obtained in different situations. Results confirm the role of Visibility and Angular Incidence in influencing participant's wayfinding strategies.
A cognitive approach for improving built environment and users’ safety in emergency conditions
TeMa, 2019
Cognitive Systems Criteria are applied to develop Building Components for individuals' emergency safety in architectural spaces. The System Architecture is defined to firstly monitor built environment conditions and human behaviors in emergency evacuation. Data are sent to a central unit and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are developed to detect critical emergency conditions. Interactive Building Components change their status basing on KPI thresholds, to provide support to the evacuees (i.e. wayfinding). Significant applications to indoor and outdoor architectural spaces are provided to demonstrate the proposed approach capabilities. Cognitive Systems can be applied in architectural spaces to improve Built Environment performances basing on users' needs. They can: 1) jointly monitor environmental conditions and human behaviours through Cognitive Built Environment (CBE) components; 2) use human-environment interaction models and related Key Performance Indicators to detect critical situations; 3) adapt CBE devices status to inform users on how to properly behave. This approach is applied to safety performances of outdoor (earthquake) and indoor (fire) scenarios, by proposing and testing solutions to support evacuees while reaching safe areas and rescuers' support.