A framework of a multi-user voice-driven BIM-based navigation system for fire emergency response

Navigation support is of significant importance for fire evacuation and rescue due to the complexity of building indoor structures and the uncertainty of fire emergency. This paper presents a framework of a multi-user voice-driven building information model (BIM)-based navigation system for fire emergency response. Classes of the navigation system is first defined being consistent with the open BIM data standard (i.e. Industry Foundation Classes, IFC). A string-matching method is then developed to generate a navigation query from each voice navigation request based on the Levenshtein distance and Burkhard and Keller (BK)-tree of a fire navigation associated lexicon. With the semantic information of the location in the navigation query, the spatial geometric information of the location is extracted from the BIM model and visibility graph-based route plans for multiple users are generated. To deliver the route planning to building users in an intuitive and direct manner, patterns of different voice prompts will be designed to automatically broadcast the navigation route step by step. Finally, the proposed navigation system will be validated with virtual reality (VR) based experiment.