A system for generating fire extinguisher plan and supporting fire evacuation route in construction project

Abstract

Fires in under-construction threaten worker safety and have a lot of negative impacts on many aspects of construction that were reported the past few years. Due to the dynamic nature of construction, the fire safety plan in construction needed to be reviewed and updated according to construction progress. The conventional approach or manual process to develop the fire safety plan for a construction project can be a time-consuming and enormous labor-intensive task. Furthermore, some of the emergency signs are unclear due to the nature of construction and some are not showing the correct evacuation route because of the structural design change based on the construction progress. BIM technology and the Game engine can present the object in 3D and provide programming for rule-based modeling. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework to develop the fire safety plan (such as fire extinguisher installation plan (FEIP) and evacuation route plan) and mobile application to assist the firefighters and people who are involved in construction during the rescue and evacuation process by considering the dynamic nature of construction. This research develops the prototype that enables the users to define the parameters for the fire extinguisher installation plan and evaluation route such as finished and unfinished building objects (walls, stairs, and slabs), exists, the locations of fire extinguishers (FE), and flammable substances (FS). This prototype provides the appropriate locations of fire extinguishers, the unsafe area, and the fastest evacuation route for a fire safety plan and the mobile application that can show the fastest evacuation route, report safe arrival and inform the location where the evacuee is stuck. To validate the proposed approach, the case study using the sample BIM model and real construction BIM model is executed. Moreover, 4 safety engineers or officers and 11 construction personnel participate in evaluating the proposed system.