Modeling and simulation of fire evacuation considering guiding factors: a case study of Shenyang subway interchange station

In case of fire, effective evacuation guidance can reduce evacuees’ hesitation time and improve evacuation efficiency. In this paper, an improved model of fire evacuation (guided fire cellular automata, GF-CA) is provided. First, the parameters of the improved model are quantified and analyzed to determine the parameter calculation method and variation law. Second, a typical subway interchange station in Shenyang is used as an example for evacuation simulation. Then, a lightweight building information modeling (BIM) is constructed and applied to the example combining the evacuation simulation software of Pathfinder and virtual reality technology for personnel evacuation simulation. Three types of simulation scenarios are examined, including simulation without guiding factors, simulation with guiding factors based on the improved model, and simulation based on the virtual reality experiment with guiding factors. The results show that the evacuation efficiency is increased by 75.63% after effective guidelines through personnel diversion and reasonable exit allocation, noting that the path results of the model are highly similar to those of the virtual reality experiment, which has good validity and rationality. Meanwhile, we analyze the guiding scheme and propose that we should pay attention to the position of the sign and the configuration of the conductor, and flexibly use the composite scheme, which provides effective technical support for improving evacuation safety and evacuation efficiency.