Enhancing fire safety with Improved Risk Index and BIM in building evacuation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive study on building, fire and evacuation, so as to effectively improve the efficiency of building fire evacuation and the management level of fire evacuation site. Make up for the difficulties of BIM technology in effectively connecting building information and fire data.Design/methodology/approachFirst, this paper establishes a fire model and an evacuation model based on BIM information. Then, the safety index (SI) is introduced as a comprehensive index, and the IRI is established by integrating the SI function to evaluate the safety of evacuation routes. Based on these two indices, the IRI-based fire evacuation model is established.FindingsThis study offers an Improved Risk Index (IRI)-based fire evacuation model, which may achieve effective evacuation in fire scenes. And the model is verified by taking the fire evacuation of a shopping center building as an example.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a fire evacuation principle based on IRI, so that the relevant personnel can comprehensively consider the fire factors and evacuation factors to achieve the optimization of building design, thereby improving the fire safety of buildings.