China Safety Science Journal ›› 2025, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (6): 174-180.doi: 10.16265/j.cnki.issn1003-3033.2025.06.0286

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Virtual experiment study on route choice behavior under influence of smoke level

CUI Chengbo1(), LI Ruoyu1, CHEN Juan2,**(), WANG Qiao1, MA Jian1   

  1. 1 School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu Sichuan 610031, China
    2 Faculty of Geosciences and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu Sichuan 610031, China
  • Received:2025-02-08 Revised:2025-04-15 Online:2025-06-28 Published:2025-07-30
  • Contact: CHEN Juan

Abstract:

To investigate the influence mechanisms of smoke environments on pedestrian's evacuation route choice behavior during fires and toxic gas leakages, and to overcome the research challenges posed by ethical constraints that make real-life human experiments difficult to conduct, in this paper, a virtual evacuation experiment platform was constructed. In order to study the influence of smoke level and route length on evacuees' route choice behavior, a single-player route choice experiment was designed and carried out under the influence of smoke, taking into account the pedestrian's speed difference under different smoke scenes in real life. Results indicate that both smoke level and route length have significant influence on evacuees' evacuation route choice behavior. The evacuees prefer to choose the route with lower smoke levels and shorter length. The results of the binary logistic regression model show that compared with the route length (Odds Ratio,OR=15.516), the smoke level (OR=45.475) has a greater influence on the route choice of evacuees. However, a small number of evacuees took a risk, that is, choosing a route with higher smoke levels for evacuation. The post-experiment questionnaire results demonstrated that participants could experience a reasonably authentic evacuation process in smoke-filled environments within the virtual reality scenarios, indicating high levels of validity and reliability for the study.

Key words: human evacuation, virtual experiment, smoke level, evacuation route choice, route length

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