Virtual Reality Evacuation Experiments on Way-Finding Systems for the Future Circular Collider

Evacuation times can be shortened in fire scenarios if people choose appropriate routes. Way-finding systems can be used to aid this process, thus their effectiveness needs to be evaluated. In the present study, the way-finding evacuation systems of the Future Circular Collider (FCC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are investigated as its evacuation design presents several challenges from the fire safety perspective. To perform a comparison of different evacuation design solutions, a set of Virtual Reality (VR) experiments involving a total of 111 participants was performed. VR was used because the FCC facility is not built yet, and it allows for high experimental control and cost-effectiveness for comparisons of way-finding systems. The VR experiments reproduced a hypothetical fire emergency in which participants’ egress behaviour was investigated. Three scenarios were represented, each of them adopting different evacuation safety concepts and way-finding systems. Different installations were included in the scenarios, such as scenario (1) flashing lights, scenario (2) static or dynamic signage (i.e. active and dissuasive signage indicating the direction towards or away from the danger) and scenario (3) a robot placed on a monorail on the vault of the tunnel, able to localize people in the tunnel and provide way-guidance information. Results show that the combination of red flashing lights at the exits, dynamic signage and a robot equipped with green flashing lights yielded the highest compliance to the way-finding intent of the system (92.6% compliance vs 62.9% and 77.5% for scenarios 1 and 2 respectively).