Simulating the Effects of Prior Environmental Knowledge on Fire Egress

Fire safety is a critical consideration in all buildings, as hazardous fires can lead to injuries, fatalities, and significant property damage. To mitigate these risks, it is essential to establish appropriate regulations, policies, and building designs aimed at preventing the onset of fires. In addition, practical and effective evacuation plans must be developed to ensure safety in the event of a fire. Creating such plans necessitates a thorough understanding of human behaviour during fire emergencies. Various methods have been employed to study these behaviours, including interviews, video recordings, full-scale evacuation demonstrations with human participants, virtual reality scenarios, and computer simulations. This paper focuses on using computer simulations to investigate fire evacuations through an evacuee model that is based on actual human behavioural patterns in fire situations. The model of the evacuee incorporates fundamental human instincts with various environmental cues. The evacuee model’s fire egress was simulated with different levels of prior environmental knowledge about where the exits were. The simulation experiments show that an evacuee took a shorter time to exit when the evacuee knew about more exit locations.