A Framework for Assessing the Building Spatial Design from Fire Evacuation Perspective

Spatial design greatly influences fire evacuation in buildings. Although the existing research has comprehensively assessed building spatial design in terms of building circulation and overlooked evaluating building evacuation circulation and how building spatial design impacts occupants' cognitive processes during a fire emergency. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework to investigate the effectiveness of building evacuation impacted by building spatial design by integrating building information model (BIM), fire simulation, and virtual reality (VR) technology. A case study is carried out to evaluate building spatial design in terms of building circulation and emergency signage. Preliminary results demonstrated that most participants preferred to select the path with the shortest safety egress distance, fewer turns, and associated with less accessible spaces. Moreover, insufficient installation of signs will lead a few participants to select the longer evacuation path and waste much effort in searching for helpful information on evacuation-irrelevant objects, which reduces fire evacuation efficiency.