Exploring the Reuse of Fire Evacuation Behaviour in Virtual Environments

There is increasing use of virtual environments to provide scenario-based training in hazardous environments, where real-world training would be difficult, dangerous or have ethical implications. One specific example is fire evacuation training and the use of virtual fire drills. Virtual environments can be used to present simulated buildings and fire hazards where evacuation drills can be safely practised. However, realism in the virtual environment, e.g. visual and sound effects, and the interactions with simulated entities, e.g. fire, smoke and other building evacuees, can impact the training experience. Also building such complex environments can be time consuming and error prone. One solution is the reuse of components that make up the virtual environment, in this case, the building layouts, the interactive environment itself, and the realistic simulation of fire hazards and fire science impact on human behaviour. This paper describes work to extend a virtual environment development pipeline for building virtual fire evacuation training systems. The pipeline integrates 3D building models and fire egress behaviour from fire evacuation simulations into a game engine. The behaviour of autonomous agents representing human evacuees, extracted from the fire simulations, is validated against the target virtual environment. Consistent agent behaviour was found across egress time, agent population scalability, the addition of fire hazards and in extended building complexity.