Serious Human Rescue Game
Immersive engineering methods for the simulation of human behaviour in the event of emergencies, using the example of the evacuation of buildings.
Duration: 2009 – 2011
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Prof. Dr.-Ing. Uwe Rüppel | dept. 13, Institute for Numerical Methods and Computer Science in Building Construction
Prof. Dr.-phil. Katrin Borcherding | Prof. Wolfgang Ellermeier, Ph.D. | Dr. rer. nat. Wolfgang Bösche
dept. 03, Psychology
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Project description:
Applying a performance-based approach to fire protection design emphasizes the safe performance of a building as a whole rather than meeting detailed code requirements. To this effect, fire safety engineers make use of computer models and simulations to describe the expected spread of fire and smoke, and the safety evacuation. Since the protection of human life is the pri-mary aim of the performance-based approach, predicting the behavior of people in danger is an essential purpose of such modeling. Particularly, the relevant human factors (individual decisions and parameters to describe human behav-ior) have to be taken into account. There is some controversy in the Fire Safety Engineering community on how to model human behavior, because appropriate methods for data collection and validation are not available. The aim of the pre-sent research is thus to achieve a better understanding of what actually happens during an extreme situation and how people come to decisions by using a seri-ous gaming approach. The research hypothesis to be examined is: Can human evacuation behavior be explored using a computer game?
