Femern SafetyLab

The Femern SafetyLab project is an innovation project funded by the Danish Ministry for Research and Education. The project is led by the Danish Fire Institute (DBI) and includes besides our group, the partners Alexandra Institute and Ramboll. The project was initiated in 2017 and will end in 2019.

The overall objective of the SafetyLab project is to enhance safety and support technological developments aiming to improve safety management of the built environment. Considered systems include tunnels, public spaces, metro stations, sports arenas and larger office buildings. Hazards considered include fire and explosion events, release of toxic substances as well as terrorist attacks. The SafetyLab project uses the Femern road and train tunnel system as a testbed. The project has two main deliverables, namely the RiskSimulator and the EmergencyCockpit

The Risk Simulator provides a full probabilistic risk model of the considered system, generic Bayesian Probabilistic Net (BPN) models integrated in utilizing Building Information Systems (BIM) to represent the hazard scenarios, in combination with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models and Agent Based evacuation modeling tools to represent the direct and indirect consequences associated with the hazard events. The probabilistic risk model allows for a coupling with any source of real time information which might be collected by sensoring devises whereby the RiskSimulator facilitates a full mapping of risks throughout the considered system at any point in time. A main functionality of the RiskSimulator is to facilitate that technology providers such as industries developing sensor technology may implement their devices into the risk model and investigate their functionality in terms of risk reduction in the context of a particular system, e.g. a particular tunnel system. This feature is supported by so-called Value of Information analysis. Moreover, on this basis, the placement and amount of different sensors may also be optimized.

The Emergency Cockpit goes one step further and provides a Virtual Reality training environment for rescue services in the case of a hazard event. To this end, the risk scenarios, the hazard events and the probabilistic agent based modeling of the people under evacuation - provided by the RiskSimulator, are utilized to establish a live situation for rescue training services to test different rescue strategies and to train the capabilities of individual rescue workers. The EmergencyCockpit may also serve as a platform for informing and training the users of the system on how to best behave in an emergency situation, and how to help others.

Our group is responsible for the development of the probabilistic risk modelling and its implementation into the BIM environment, including the BPN based generic systems risk models, development and incorporation of probabilistic CFD modelling of fire and smoke scenarios and the probabilistic modeling of evacuation applying agent based models. Click here to see more detailed technical information, simulations, example results as well as presentations and papers we have presented at various conferences and published in journals.