A System for Developing and Evaluating Fire Extinguisher Plans of Construction Projects in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Fires in under-construction threaten to worker safety and have a lot of negative impacts on many aspects of construction that were reported the past few years. Many constructions do not possess the permanent fire protection system, and only rely on the fire extinguisher or water tank to extinguish the fire. Moreover, a construction site has numerous features that make its uncommon and unanticipated structure. In a construction environment, changing is one of the characteristics that make it unique compared to others. Due to the dynamic nature of construction, the fire safety plan in construction needed to be reviewed and updated according to construction progress. The convention approach or manual process to develop the fire safety plan for a construction project can be a time-consuming and enormous labour-intensive task. BIM technology and Game engine can present the object in 3D and provide programming for the rule-based modelling. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework to assess the fire extinguisher installation plan (FEIP) and recommend the locations of fire extinguisher 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 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 and shows the unsafe area. To validate the proposed approach, the case study using the sample BIM model is executed. The proposed system is expected to have the capability of assisting the safety engineers in developing and assessing the fire extinguisher installation plan.