Fire hazard assessment with indoor spaces for evacuation route selection in building fire scenarios

A safe and effective evacuation route is important for reducing casualties during building fires, and this topic has been a long-term focus of emergency management. Indoor space is a space within one or multiple buildings consisting of architectural components and is the basis of indoor route analyses. Based on indoor space, an indoor network model is designed that considers fire protection design, spatial matching between fire information and the indoor space, and the passability of the indoor space during a fire. Then, an evacuation route selection algorithm that considers hazard and time is proposed. The key features of the route selection algorithm, which include assessing the fire hazards, evacuation time in each indoor space and parallel computing in the route selection algorithm, are subsequently presented. Finally, taking a gymnasium as an example, case modelling and fire information integration are performed to investigate two fire scenarios and the optimal evacuation routes over time are identified in each scenario.