BIM-based building fire emergency management: Combining building users' behavior decisions

Abstract The application of advanced technology and building user's different behavior decisions has an important impact on the performance of fire emergency management. Currently, although many studies have focused on developing advanced technology and improving fire emergency management effectiveness, advanced technology often fails because of the inapplicability or non-use of the technology. Therefore, it is necessary to combine building users' behavior decisions with advanced technology and propose fire response modes that are adapted for such users. Based on the Building Information Modeling (BIM) platform, this paper builds a fire emergency management system (FEMS) that considers the behavior decisions of building users (behaviors such as escape, wait for rescue, and fire extinguishing). We develop a database management module and four functional modules that include fire intelligence-monitoring, fire-warning, fire-response, and fire-treatment. The system realizes the dynamic monitoring of building fires, the judgment of fire category, the locations of users, and the ability to view fire-points in a three-dimensional (3D) model. In addition, this system can also plan optimal action routes according to different building user's decisions, while the application (app) provides visual route guidance. Through a fire scene simulation experiment, we show that the moving distance of the Test Group equipped with FEMS is 30% shorter than the Control Group, and the total time spent is reduced by 48%. Also, the performance of each type of decision-makers' behavior in the Test Group was better than that of the Control Group.