A Virtual Reality Exit Choice Experiment to Assess the Impact of Social Influence and Fire Wardens in a Metro Station Evacuation
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Date
2025-05-19
Open Access Location
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Rights
(c) 2025 The Author/s
CC BY 4.0
CC BY 4.0
Abstract
Assessing evacuation time is a fundamental task in fire engineering. One of the key decisions made in evacuation dynamics is exit choice. In this work, we propose a new immersive virtual reality (VR) experiment to assess the effects of social influence and fire wardens’ instructions on the exit chosen. We also investigate if and how the perceived level of authority of the fire wardens (i.e., metro staff members or firefighters) can affect these decisions. The proposed immersive VR experiment includes 12 different scenarios during a fire evacuation in an underground metro station. A sample of 131 participants took part in the experiment, making 1048 choices. We estimate a discrete choice model to quantify if and how these factors affect the participants’ decisions. The results show that both instructions by fire wardens and social influence significantly affect exit choice and that the impact of fire wardens can change depending on their perceived level of authority.
Description
Keywords
Discrete choice model, Evacuation, Exit choice, Fire safety engineering, Human behaviour in fire, Virtual reality
Citation
Lu S, Rodriguez M, Feng Z, Paes D, Daemei AB, Vancetti R, Mander S, Mandal T, Rao KR, Lovreglio R. (2025). A Virtual Reality Exit Choice Experiment to Assess the Impact of Social Influence and Fire Wardens in a Metro Station Evacuation. Fire Technology.