Abstract
As an enclosed and normally crowded environment, underground rail station is a dangerous place when fire emergency happens. Traditional methods usually adopt simulation or drill to evaluate station design or contingency plans, which differ far from real situations in both parameters and people’s complicated behavior in an emergency, especially the staff’s guiding action. Staff’s behaviors are enormously important for evacuation, because evacuation path is complex and smoking diffusing is in the same direction with the path to some extent. In this regard, a fire evacuation system considering staff’s behavior in virtual reality environment was developed. The distinguished features of the system embodied in three aspects. First, it provided a vivid, interactive and immersed platform for staff to practice and optimize evacuation plan. Second, staff’s behaviors and their implication on passengers’ evacuation were modeled. Passengers were treated as multi-agent that can feel the surrounding environment including staff’s guiding, and they can change their paths in real-time which implemented by a dynamic path choice model. Third, input and visualization of the fire data extracted from fire simulation, and the 3D station model, provide quite real evacuation environment. Recruiting staff from operation company as subjects, the platform was applied for fire evacuation test considering staff’s intervention. The results demonstrate that the proposed model and developed system can be effectively used for contingency plan evaluation and improvement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahir K, Govani K, Gajera R, Shah M (2020) Application on virtual reality for enhanced education learning, military training and sports. Augment Hum Res 5:1–9
Alaraj A, Lemole MG, Finkle JH, Yudkowsky R, Wallace A, Luciano C, Banerjee PP, Rizzi SH, Charbel FT (2011) Virtual reality training in neurosurgery: review of current status and future applications. Surg Neurol Int 2:52
Albis KA, Radhwi MN, Gawad AFA (2015) Fire dynamics simulation and evacuation for a large shopping center (mall): part I, fire simulation scenarios. Am J Energy Eng 3:52–71
Bourhim T, Cherkaoui TA (2020) Efficacy of virtual reality for studying people’s pre-evacuation behavior under fire. Int J Hum Comput Stud 142:102484
Çakiroğlu Ü, Gökoğlu S (2019) Development of fire safety behavioral skills via virtual reality. Comput Educ 133:56–68
Cao L, Lin J, Li N (2019) A virtual reality based study of indoor fire evacuation after active or passive spatial exploration. Comput Hum Behav 90:37–45
Chae J (2018) Study on firefighting education and training applying virtual reality. Fire Sci Eng 32:108–115
Cornes FE, Frank GA, Dorso CO (2021) Microscopic dynamics of the evacuation phenomena in the context of the Social Force Model. Physica A 568:125744
Dalladaku Y, Kelley J, Lacey B, Mitchiner J, Welsh B, Beigh M (2020) Assessing the effectiveness of virtual reality in the training of army aviators. In: Proceedings of the 2020 annual general Donald R. Keith Memorial Capstone Conference, New York, NY
Dijkstra EW (1959) A note on two problems in connexion with graphs. Numer Math 1:269–271
Elmqaddem N (2019). Augmented reality and virtual reality in education. Myth or reality? Int J Emerg Technol Learn 14
Hassannayebi E, Memarpour M, Mardani S, Shakibayifar M, Bakhshayeshi I, Espahbod S (2020) A hybrid simulation model of passenger emergency evacuation under disruption scenarios: a case study of a large transfer railway station. J Simul 14:204–228
Izard SG, Juanes JA, Peñalvo FJG, Estella JMG, Ledesma MJS, Ruisoto P (2018) Virtual reality as an educational and training tool for medicine. J Med Syst 42:1–5
Jin T (1970) Visibility through fire smoke (I). Bull Jpn Assoc Fire Sci Eng 19:1–8
Kang Z, Zhang L, Li K (2019) An improved social force model for pedestrian dynamics in shipwrecks. Appl Math Comput 348:355–362
Kinateder M, Pauli P, Mueller M, Krieger J, Heimbecher F, Roennau I, Bergerhausen U, Vollmann G, Vogt P, Muehlberger A (2013) Human behaviour in severe tunnel accidents: Effects of information and behavioural training. Transport Res F: Traffic Psychol Behav 17:20–32
Li S, Chen F, Li C (2009) Passages’ density and travel speed at subway stations. J Res Urban Rail Transit 12(34–36):41
Li C, Liang W, Quigley C, Zhao Y, Yu L-F (2017a) Earthquake safety training through virtual drills. IEEE Trans vis Comput Graph 23:1275–1284
Li L, Yu F, Shi D, Shi J, Tian Z, Yang J, Wang X, Jiang Q (2017b) Application of virtual reality technology in clinical medicine. Am J Transl Res 9:3867
Liu X, Zhang J, Hou G, Wang Z (2018) Virtual reality and its application in military. In: IOP conference series: earth and environmental science. IOP Publishing, p 032155
Lovreglio R, Duan X, Rahouti A, Phipps R, Nilsson D (2020) Comparing the effectiveness of fire extinguisher virtual reality and video training. Virtual Real 25:1–13
Lu J, Fang Z, Lu Z, Zhao C (2002) Mathematical model of evacuation speed for personnel in buildings. Eng J Wuhan Univ 35:66–70
Mossberg A, Nilsson D, Wahlqvist J (2020) Evacuation elevators in an underground metro station: a virtual reality evacuation experiment. Fire Saf J 12:103091
Pantelidis VS (2010) Reasons to use virtual reality in education and training courses and a model to determine when to use virtual reality. Themes Sci Technol Educ 2:59–70
Pulijala Y, Ma M, Pears M, Peebles D, Ayoub A (2018) An innovative virtual reality training tool for orthognathic surgery. Int J Oral Maxillofac Surg 47:1199–1205
Purser D (1989) Modelling time to incapacitation and death from toxic and physical hazards in aircraft fires. AGARD, Aircraft Fire Safety 13 p(SEE N 90-17581 10-03).
Purser D (1993) Interactions between behaviour patterns and physiological impairment in escape from fire. In: Proceedings of Interflam, pp 579–593
Purser DA (2002) Toxicity assessment of combustion products. SFPE Handb Fire Prot Eng 2:83–171
Sacks R, Perlman A, Barak R (2013) Construction safety training using immersive virtual reality. Constr Manag Econ 31:1005–1017
Sermet Y, Demir I (2019) Flood action VR: a virtual reality framework for disaster awareness and emergency response training. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Posters
Sharma S, Jerripothula, S Mackey S, Soumare O (2014) Immersive virtual reality environment of a subway evacuation on a cloud for disaster preparedness and response training. In: 2014 IEEE symposium on computational intelligence for human-like intelligence (CIHLI)
Smith S, Ericson E (2009) Using immersive game-based virtual reality to teach fire-safety skills to children. Virtual Real 13:87–99
Tao R, Zhu Y, Ren H, Guo L (2017). Ship fire-fighting training system based on virtual reality technique. J Shanghai Maritime Univ
Tichon J, Burgess-Limerick R (2011) A review of virtual reality as a medium for safety related training in mining. J Health Saf Res Pract 3:33–40
Van Den Berg J, Guy SJ, Lin M, Manocha D (2011) Reciprocal n-body collision avoidance. In: Robotics research. Springer, Berlin
Van Wyk E, De Villiers R (2009) Virtual reality training applications for the mining industry. In: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on computer graphics, virtual reality, visualisation and interaction in Africa, pp 53–63
Wang J, Nan L, Lei Z (2015) Small group behaviors and their impacts on pedestrian evacuation. In: Control & decision conference
Wang P, Wu P, Wang J, Chi H-L, Wang X (2018) A critical review of the use of virtual reality in construction engineering education and training. Int J Environ Res Public Health 15:1204
Woolley A, Ewer J, Lawrence P, Deere S, Travers A, Whitehouse T, Galea ER (2020) A naval damage incident recoverability toolset: assessing naval platform recoverability after a fire event. Ocean Eng 207:107351
Zhang K, Suo J, Chen J, Liu X, Gao L (2017) Design and implementation of fire safety education system on campus based on virtual reality technology. In: 2017 Federated conference on computer science and information systems (FedCSIS). IEEE, pp 1297–1300
Zhou B, Jia Q (2011) Application of virtual reality simulation technology to earthquake emergency drill. J Natl Disasters 5:008
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the data support from Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport, and the research is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2022JBZY039) and the National Engineering Laboratory project for the Safety Technology of Urban Rail Transit System (Development and Reform Office High Technology [2016] No. 583).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this paper.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Wang, Z., Mao, Z., Li, Y. et al. VR-based fire evacuation in underground rail station considering staff’s behaviors: model, system development and experiment. Virtual Reality 27, 1145–1155 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-022-00718-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-022-00718-3