Simulating cooperative fire evacuation training in a virtual environment using gaming technology

Fire accidents are one of the most frequently occurring disasters leading to life and property loss. Training for fire escape skills and designing efficient building evacuation plans are increasingly important research topics. Virtual environments (VE) are widely used to support training and simulating human response under emergency situations. However, current VE based training systems have limited intelligent non-player characters (NPC) which are lacking in support of fire science knowledge. This project will introduce a hybrid method combining gaming technology, agent programming and fire science knowledge to design an evacuation training system for fire wardens. The success of using professional numerical fire simulation tool to support NPC behaviour in virtual environment will provide a new way to enhance the realism of virtual environment by using high fidelity fire data sources.