Analysing Building Fire Evacuation Behaviour by Integrating Virtual Reality and Graph Theory

Understanding how building occupants respond to fire emergencies is critical to developing an effective building fire safety design. Existing research has assessed building fire safety design and investigated visual attention during the wayfinding process. However, these studies overlooked how the layout distribution affects occupants’ evacuation behaviour during fire emergencies. Therefore, this paper proposed a methodology for fire evacuation behaviour analysis by integrating virtual reality (VR) and graph theory (GT). Evacuation behavioural data were collected by developing a VR platform, and integrated into the schematic graph based on GT rules to analyse the effects of building design on evacuation behaviour. A case study was conducted to parametrically assess the building layout plan and collect behavioural data to analyse evacuation behaviour during fire emergencies. The results showed that the building layout design affects evacuation behaviour and visual attention allocation. This study provides a novel method for analysing fire evacuation behaviour and providing insights into the fire safety design.