Project BEST No: E!114043 received funding from Program Eurostars-2
Eurostars is a program co-funded by Eureka national funding bodies and the European Union Horizon 2020 framework program.
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Real-time Building Evacuation Simulation & Training System for Airborne Hazards & Fire
New interactive simulation system that co-simulates and visualizes in 3D and real time the evolution of fire, CBRN and toxic gas dispersion coupled with crowd behavior, injuries, rescuers and dynamic building behavior embedded in BIM (Building Information Modelling).
1. Overview
Disasters in confined spaces caused by fire, toxic agent release or terrorist attack can cause significant casualties and one of the key issues to be addressed is the evacuation of these special spaces.
The aim of the BEST project is to contribute to the safety of building construction and operation. This can be achieved by providing tools to simulate crisis situations in these spaces for architects, emergency managers, rescue workers and similar professions dealing with safety.
There are a specific simulators and models to support the design, education, training and exercising of specialists. But the BEST idea is to integrate multiple systems from different domains into a multi-purpose interactive simulation platform for accidental or man-made disastrous events.
The orchestrated on-line simulation can reflect the interaction of building, fire development, crowd behaviour and even the rescuers intervention in order to understand the underlying mechanisms of such processes and optimize both buildings design and safety practices.
Five organizations (companies and university) with the history in research and development in this area joined their effort to bring a new solution to the market and to help the architects and designers to build safer buildings and to enable the crisis managers and rescuers to optimize their activities in order to save more lives.
The BEST solution benefits from the BIM standard (Building Information Modelling) as a source of description of any confined space, the cloud computing power to scale up the complex calculation and the state-of-the-art gaming visualisation of the situation development.
2. Basics
The project objectives are as follows:
Integration of 5 co-systems from different domains into a multi-purpose interactive, simulation platform for accidental or man-made disastrous events.
- Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)/ Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) for fire/toxic gas/CBRN spread at incident scene
- Crowd behavioral model based on spread simulation results.
- Injuries model as a result of people exposure to toxic, radiant and other harmful substances
- Dynamic building elements
- Rescuers and first responders' interventions model.
Use of CLOUD SaaS (Software as a Service).
Risk mitigation methods and tools may include:
- Buildings design audits
- Emergency plans
- Evacuation plans
- Staff education, training, exercising
- Simulation of crisis situations
- Modelling of crisis events
To support the above methods, the integrated simulation environment is built.
The key features of the BEST approach are:
2.1 BIM - Building Information Modelling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_information_modeling
The BIM standard is recognized by an increasing number of countries as a key element in the digitization of construction management and all related e-government activities.
It is becoming a mandatory part of building permit applications and at the same time plans for existing buildings are being converted to this standard. Not only does this make construction more efficient, but it also provides a very useful, fast and effective input into all downstream software systems - whether it is for economic optimization of design or, as in our case, for the safety of residents and visitors.
2.2 CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) model
An important part of a BIM project is the CFD model. Using it, we are able to determine the evolution of a fire or the release of toxic substances in time and space and therefore dynamically define the threat to the occupants of the building.
2.3 Crowd simulation model
This kind of model makes it possible to estimate how people would behave in the event of an emergency defined by the CFD model.
There are many crowd simulation programs on the market, even with an open-source license, but like CFD models, they work in a static environment, without the ability to react to changing situations (opening/closing doors and windows, broken walls, sudden obstacles, etc.).
The main factor that drives the person-actor in the evacuation game is the multidimensional vector that contains the perceptions and physical states of the person. The person in question has a notion of the goal they want to achieve, i.e. typically the exit from the room, and is thus drawn towards it. On the other hand, the person "feels" a high temperature from a certain direction and knows that it is to be avoided, also sees or feels a wall or other obstacle (it may be another person or a group of people who are no longer moving) and also sees and feels, for example, smoke coming from a certain direction. As a result of the complex consideration of where the person's next move will be, the person will move in a calculated direction, considering all the previously mentioned phenomena. Of course, there is also the state of the person, to what extent he or she is affected by developments in the environment and whether he or she will be able to move at all.
2.4 Injuries model
The actual simulated person has certain attributes attached to them that describe their ability to move or their injuries that go so far as to create an obstacle.
The status of a person in the simulated space is described by parameters and conditional changes linked to the results of CFD model and surrounding situation ...
2.5 Dynamic Synchronized Modelling
The main goal of BEST is to provide the orchestrated activity of several models as is described here:
This feature brings the solution with the possibility of dynamically simulate the situation development, even within a changing scene (windows, doors, obstacles, coming rescuers, ...).
2.6 BEST Architecture and infrastructure
The BEST system relies on the Service-oriented architecture concept.
It allows for scalable implementation with flexibility in case of changes or new findings.
The infrastructure is based on cloud resources. Because computing requirements change dynamically and unpredictably, the optimal solution is to base BEST on cloud resources that are virtually unlimited.
2.7 SPACES - Scenarios
To moderate the development and to test the results, two far different localities were selected. One is the typical administrative building with some labs (we selected the UTB due to the long-years lasting successful collaboration ). The second is a special tunnel, built by the Austrian government to study and exercise critical situations.
UIniversity building
We used the building of the Tomas Bata University in Zlin and its BIM representation. It offers wide range of scenarios, including the stairs and two-floor setup.
Tunnel
The Tunnel in Austria is an elaborated facility, equipped with all possible features, devices, systems and shaped properly to provide for vast range of scenarios, observation, monitoring and evaluation. Also the BIM representation of the tunnel was used for the BEST pilot implementation.
2.8 Information elements
There are many kinds of data which describe the scene, scenario and its participants. As the goal of BEST simulation is to have possibility to dynamically change some parameters (opening/closing doors or windows, breaking walls, inserting obstacles etc.), the set of parameters is rather comprehensive and needs to be processed during simulation.
2.9 Space description - Voxels
The whole space simulated is described with a help of "Voxels", which are cubes - the basic space elements, similar to Pixels in the 2D picture. The typical number of voxels processed during the simulation counts in millions.
2.10 Persons description - information profile
Important is also the profile of the person, which influence its behavior in the space, related to the actual conditions.
Obviously, the entire stack of values related to the person (agent in the simulation) must be updated in real time based on the results of other model calculations or activities coming through the control module from the "control room". Each further step of the agent itself depends on the current information state of the whole "simulation run".
From this it can be easily deduced that a powerful computing infrastructure is needed to run the entire simulation in real time. For this reason, intensive computations are performed in the cloud, where it is possible to dynamically change the required performance and scale according to the needs of a specific simulation.
3. Simulation and visualisation
The key innovation of the BEST project is the synchronised and interconnected simulation of several events, the course of which can be influenced by external operator interventions, including changes in the topology of the environment in which the simulation takes place (opening/closing windows or doors, breaking down walls, etc.).
The CFD simulator provides information on changes in the enclosed environment caused, for example, by the effects of a fire, where smoke, high temperature or other hazardous substances that may be released, for example, by a terrorist attack, gradually permeate the space. A simulation of this process progressing in time can be seen in the following figures.
Or you may watch the time evolution in the linked videos:
And the similar situation with the tunnel space:
Also, with the video visualization:
The simulated space filled in time by the CFD model results is used in parallel to simulate the evacuation using the Crowd simulation model.
After several experiments with widely used open-source modelling platforms (e.g. NETLOGO).
Later it was found that the complexity of the model and the need for the most realistic visual output required some other engine, and the decision was taken to use a game platform.
The Unreal engine platform was chosen, which even in its unpaid version provides ample opportunities to prototype solutions within the project.
Experimental deployment and use of this platform is currently underway and shows promise for achieving both the great flexibility of the solution and the necessary performance and visual impact for the presentation level of the BEST system.
Current work is moving towards describing basic situations and actions and adapting them to the environment.
For example, actions such as how to avoid fire, how to follow a leader, etc. are described. These embryonic elements will gradually be combined into more complex storylines that arise during evacuation.
Examples of the test runs can be seen here:https://youtu.be/Ek9K7bhNtik
4. Conclusions
The BEST project is now in its final phase of integration and final tuning of its individual components and transfer to a powerful cloud environment.
During the project, the transfer of BIM standard data into the simulation environment has been mastered, which is a key factor for the subsequent use in many buildings and the ease of transferring descriptive data from their documentation.
CFD simulation capabilities were also verified on two specific types of enclosed spaces (University Building, Training Tunnel).
Finally, the Unreal Engine platform was incorporated into the system for powerful simulation of human movement and visualization of the results.
The final results of the project are available since May 2023.