Measure the Evacuees’ Preference on Architectural Cues by CAVE

An evacuees’ preference prediction function on architectural cues are described here as a crucial part of the evacuation model to simulate how the evacuees search the route to exit according to the architectural information in the public underground space. The model is developed to evaluate the egress design in the initial space design stage and to provide the existing compositive evacuation models a support on the usage of architectural information. First the over simplification on the architectural information in the existing evacuation models is discussed. Then a list of so-called architectural cues and the related evacuation model are introduced, in which the evacuees always egress to the seen or remembered architectural cue with the highest preference in every step. The emphasis of the paper is put on the analysis of the preference function including the CAVE-based conjoint analysis research method, the experiment design and implementation of the virtual drill, and the estimation of the parameters from the collected choices. The preference function for five architectural cue pairs, Doorway-Doorway, Stair-Stair, Exit-Exit, Doorway-Stair, Exit-Stair is built from the choice data of nearly one hundred Chinese subjects