BIM-based immersive indoor graph networks for emergency situations in buildings

In the last decade, the significance of the emergency management in public infrastructures has increased due to changed security conditions worldwide and leads to the necessity of computer-aided emergency assessment process for extreme situations. In case of a fire in a building the evacuation and rescue of endangered people have highest priority for the rescue teams and are influenced by various parameters like geometry and material of building elements, the spread of fire and smoke, the behavior of endangered people as much as the escape routes they choose to exit from the building. Each of these aspects can be simulated based on different computer methods, but cannot be considered independent from each other. The challenges are to develop an integrated engineering environment based on Building Information Models (BIM), to generate the potential escape routes for endangered people (depended on the actual situation in the building) and to have a realistic visualization of results with an immersive system. This paper presents an approach to set up a new “Immersive Safety Engineering Environment” (ISEE) to model emergency situations in buildings and to experience these situations from endangered people's perspective. With ISEE escape routes based on graph networks for endangered people can be calculated depending on actual building conditions and the evacuation process can be visually evaluated. This leads to a higher degree of building fire safety.