Application of Minecraft in the study of evacuation dynamics under fire emergency conditions

Fire emergencies pose a great threat to human health and cause numerous deaths in modern buildings. Minecraft has proved to be a useful tool in children's education and artificial intelligence studies, but no research has used Minecraft for evacuation experiments under fire emergency. In this study, we conducted a series of evacuation experiments under both normal and fire-emergency conditions in Minecraft, which can provide 3D visual effects and allows for the simultaneous participation of multiple participants. A new software program, MCTrack, was developed to accurately recognise pedestrian locations from the Minecraft database and then automatically draw the trajectories and fundamental diagrams. The results showed that in the fire emergency scenarios, the pedestrians exhibited a greater detour angle and avoided the fire in advance, rather than detouring only when they were close to the fire. The times to reach maximum density and velocity in the fire emergency scenario in a square room were delayed compared with the normal-condition scenario because of the longer travel distance caused by the detour, and the maximum velocity was slightly increased owing to the pushing behaviour. Fire evacuations in a corridor-like room were characterised by the formation of a self-organised queue and sequential passage through the exit, which led to a narrower and more concentrated distribution in the fundamental diagrams. Finally, the commercial egress simulators Pathfinder and AnyLogic were used to simulate the same scenarios to evaluate the experimental results of Minecraft. The results indicated that Minecraft has feasibility in providing realistic pedestrian behaviour and crowd flow characteristics during evacuations.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study conducted evacuation experiments in Minecraft under fire emergency conditions and found that people tend to detour in advance to avoid the fire. The formation of a self-organized queue and sequential passage through the exit characterized the evacuations in corridor-like rooms. The research demonstrated the feasibility of using Minecraft to simulate fire evacuations.