Ruggiero Lovreglio

Verified

Ruggiero verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Ruggiero verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• PhD MEng BEng in Civil Engineering
• Professor (Full) at Massey University

Evacuation effectively mitigates potential harm for building occupants in case of emergencies. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) have emerged as research tools and means to enhance evacuation preparedness and effectiveness. Unlike VR, where users are immersed in computer-generated environments, the more novel AR technology allows users to e...

Understanding how people behave during the fire evacuation is fundamental to predict the required time to evacuate buildings and transportation systems and enhance their safety. To date, several studies have been carried out to investigate the impact of several social and environmental factors on how evacuees choose exits while moving towards safe...

In the event of a fire emergency in the built environment, occupants face a range of evacuation decisions, including the choice of exits. An important question from the standpoint of evacuation safety is how evacuees make these choices and what factors affect their choices. Understanding how humans weigh these (often) competing factors is essential...

Unsafe behaviour in the workplace and disaster events can lead to serious harm and damage. Safety training has been a widely studied topic over the past two decades. Its primary aim is to save lives and minimise damage but requires regular refreshers. New digital technologies are helping in the process of enhancing safety training for better knowle...

Hospital evacuations present unique challenges due to the dependency of patients on medical staff and specialised equipment, making the process particularly complex. This study investigates the pre-evacuation and movement phases during hospital evacuation drills conducted in New Zealand, providing rare and valuable data that are critical for improv...

Air quality is crucial to our health and well-being, as poor air quality can lead to serious health problems such as asthma, allergies, and other respiratory conditions. Educating people about air quality is key to improving awareness and taking action to reduce its negative effects. Gamification offers a creative and engaging way to deliver educat...

This brief offers an overview of the legislative and planning frameworks relevant to wildfire management in Aotearoa New Zealand to provide insights into how wildfire is managed and integrated into planning processes. It is written for a range of disciplines involved in residential land development and construction, such as natural hazard risk mana...

The construction industry constantly pursues innovative methods to improve safety, enhance productivity, and reduce costs and project durations. Augmented Reality (AR) is a promising technology, potentially bringing about changes in construction. AR can be useful for visualizing data in construction sites and preventing clashes or accidents. One of...

Green roofs represent a hallmark of sustainable design and provide opportunities for increased recognition and credits within sustainability assessment frameworks. This study examines the thermal performance of green roofs in Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington, considering two scenarios: present conditions as a "baseline scenario" and future cl...

Safety training is crucial to mitigate the risk of damage when a disaster occurs and can play a vital role in enhancing community response. Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology for safety training that holds great pedagogical potential. This study aims to explore the effectiveness of AR training in terms of knowledge acquisition and ret...

Simulating fire and evacuation scenarios is crucial for engineers to assess building safety during fire incidents. Accurate simulations require data on occupants' behaviors, particularly during the pre‐evacuation phase as these decisions significantly impact evacuation duration. Gathering comprehensive data from diverse regions while considering cu...

This short communication presents the findings of the work conducted by the human behaviour in fire permanent working group of the International Association for Fire Safety Science. Its aim is to identify determinants of research gaps in the field of human behaviour in fire. Two workshops were conducted in 2023 in which research gaps were identifie...

Unsafe behaviors and hazardous conditions in the workplace could pose serious risks resulting in major accidents. Safety training is critical for enhancing personal safety awareness and reducing accident severity and numbers. Augmented Reality (AR) is an emerging technology that superimposes digital information onto the real-world environment, whic...

The emergence of pandemics like Covid-19 has raised important issues regarding the safe utilisation of spaces due to the potential for virus transmission in both enclosed and open built environments. This chapter explores the challenges posed by pandemics in terms of safe space utilisation, considering the potential virus transmission risks. It pre...

Fire safety training is crucial to increase building occupants' chances of surviving a fire emergency. Traditional training methods, such as lectures using video presentations, have limitations that can hinder learning performance. This article describes the development and testing of an alternative training solution using Augmented Reality (AR) te...

Metro construction poses significant risks and is prone to severe safety accidents. Safety training is critical to mitigate risks and reduce the number of accidents, as it allows workers to enhance their skills in risk identification, risk assessment, and risk response and ultimately reduce accidents. However, traditional training methods used toda...

Vulnerable populations (e.g., populations with lower income or disabilities) are disproportionately impacted by natural hazards like wildfires. It is crucial to develop equitable and effective evacuation strategies to meet their unique needs. While existing studies offer valuable insights, we need to improve our understanding of how vulnerabilities...

Effective wildfire evacuation planning requires understanding where evacuees are likely to travel and temporarily reside. Detailed information on evacuee destinations is a valuable input into critical decisions related to evacuation traffic control, shelter assignment, and return-entry planning. To improve our understanding of where evacuees stay,...

Modern experiments investigating human behaviour in emergencies are often implemented in virtual reality (VR), due to the increased experimental control and improved ethical viability over physical reality (PR). However, there remain questions regarding the validity of the results obtained from these environments, and no full validation of VR exper...

Understanding human behaviour in fires (HBiF), whether in building or wildland fire contexts, is crucial for saving lives and managing evacuations. However, existing research lacks a comprehensive analysis of HBiF knowledge from both perspectives. To address this issue, we examined nearly 1,900 HBiF-related research papers and their references, ide...

Understanding the movement of pedestrians carrying baggage is crucial for predicting and enhancing the level of service on stairways, especially for public gathering places such as train stations and airports. In this study, we conducted a series of wellcontrolled experiments on experimental tairways, categorizing them into two main types: individu...

Background Study Virtual reality (VR) is becoming a popular technology for safety training in construction. Several VR training prototypes have been designed and tested, which show they can perform better than traditional training tools. However, most of these existing tools are not underpinned by clear pedagogical theory, and studies assessing the...

This paper investigates the application of mechanics-informed artificial intelligence to civil structural systems. Structural analysis is a traditional practice that involves engineers to solve different real-life problems. Several approaches can be used for this task, going from “by hand” computation to the recent advanced finite element method. H...

Climate change is increasing the threat of wildfires to populated areas, especially those within the wildland-urban interface (WUI). The 2021 Marshall fire forced the evacuation of over 30,000 people in Boulder, Jeffer-son and Adams Counties in Colorado, US. To improve our understanding of wildfire evacuation response, we surveyed individuals affec...

In Collaboration with the CIB Future Leaders Network, Doctoral candidates and Early Career Researchers are invited to a one-day workshop on Built Environment Research Practice. The event was held at Massey University, Auckland New Zealand.

Real-time decision-making & Reducing operational disruptions & Enhancing productivity

Digitalisation provides new tools for various industries and sectors, moving them towards a new evolution path. The Architectural, Engineering, Construction, and Operation (AECO) industry may have experienced some lag, but it has constantly been catching up over the past decade. The main drivers of digitalisation may include Industry 4.0 goals, a g...

In this paper, we propose a 3D object detection method called MMAF-Net that is based on the multi-view and multi-stage adaptive fusion of RGB images and LiDAR point cloud data. This is an end-to-end architecture, which combines the characteristics of RGB images, the front view of point clouds based on reflection intensity, and the bird's eye view o...

Identifying effective strategies describing crowd dynamics is crucial to enhance simulations of pedestrians for crowded event planning and management. Various modelling solutions have been proposed to describe how people try to exit from a built environment in normal and emergency. Several of these solutions rely on the use of distance maps or floo...

Various methodologies and technologies have been developed and tested to train communities for natural hazards and investigate human behaviour. The combination of Virtual Reality (VR) and Serious Games (SG) represents a promising solution to expose communities to different hazardous scenarios in a totally safe way and without exposing the testers t...

We commend Kocifaj et al. (2023) for their informative article on the approaches and challenges of measuring and monitoring light pollution. As the authors suggest, light pollution has many critical implications and requires multidisciplinary collaboration. To break down disciplinary silos, it is essential also to consider new emerging technologies...

With increasing rates of elderly and obese people in the population, questions are being raised about the validity of inputs used by computer evacuation models to predict the movement of crowds in the built environment. The objective of this study is to examine the movement of individuals in a VR environment. Exploring individual movement in VR (wh...

Occupant safety in case of building fires depends on the selection of proper evacuation routes. Today, several passive and active Emergency Wayfinding Systems (EWSs) have been proposed to support occupant route choices. Nevertheless, their effectiveness should be accurately assessed before being manufactured and used. In this sense, Virtual Reality...

Individual wayfinding decisions are critical for evacuation efficiency in building emergencies. By synthesizing the increasing volume of relevant literature, this study proposes a theoretical framework for individual wayfinding decisions in building emergencies. Consisting of four modules of cognitive processes and a module of acute stress, the fra...

Performance-based approach is used for the design of buildings worldwide including the design of retirement facilities. This approach requires the use of engineering models to assess the level of safety of the design and make sure that it provides an equivalent level of safety compared to a prescriptive-based design. To estimate the level of safety...

Artificial light at night (ALAN) is ever-present in modern society and has revolutionised our lives. Along with its many benefits, ALAN can have adverse effects that are studied across many fields, including astronomy, epidemiology, and ecology. This paper collates multi-disciplinary knowledge on measuring light pollution through a systematic revie...

Purpose - In the construction sector, site excavation is one of the most dangerous and challenging activities. Proper training can be an effective way to mitigate excavation hazards. Virtual Reality (VR) has been used as an effective training tool to enhance safety performance in various industries. However, little attention has been paid to the po...

To develop effective wildfire evacuation plans, it is crucial to study evacuation decision-making and identify the factors affecting individuals' choices. Statistic models (e.g., logistic regression) are widely used in the literature to predict household evacuation decisions, while the potential of machine learning models has not been fully explore...

One of the main challenges of construction projects is managing delays; there is still a lot to overcome to reach near-zero delays (mitigation of delays) in all construction projects. Technology and different platforms are applied to support a high volume of data flow acquired from multiple resources during the construction project life cycle; how...

The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions made it necessary to move learning activities online, requiring educators to think outside the box to create authentic and experiential learning activities for students. This paper describes how virtual field trips were developed to actively engage construction students and evaluates the impact of the pedagogic...

Purpose This paper aims to explore augmented reality (AR) applications in construction safety academic literature and propose possible improvements for future scholarly works. The paper explicitly focuses on AR integration with Construction 4.0 technologies as an effective solution to safety concerns in the construction industry. Design/methodolog...

Risk-mitigation in historical Urban Built Environments (UBEs) should be designed by considering not only historical scenarios and hazard features but also their users and how they respond to emergencies. Flood is a critical disaster in historical UBEs, mainly in outdoor public spaces, essentially because of users’ interactions with floodwaters spre...

Urban-scale evacuation may take place because of disasters or emergencies. Efforts have been made to enhance the preparedness of communities for urban-scale evacuation. For instance, wayfinding systems are installed and implemented in tsunami-prone regions, indicating the evacuation routes to high ground or inland. However, communities tend not to...

Evacuation models represent one of the main tools used to assess building fire safety. Existing evacuation models are based on data from evacuation drills in western and developed countries, while there is a need for data from South Asian and developing countries (in general). This paper presents the results of an evacuation drill carried out in a...

Building Information Modelling is a technology which has been revolutionizing the Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry for the last 20 years. BIM can be defined as a sharing platform that can present a parametric 3D model with in-depth project information in the form of a digital display enabling a workflow for designing, bui...

As the threat of wildfire increases, it is imperative to enhance the understanding of household evacuation behavior and movements. Mobile GPS data provide a unique opportunity for studying evacuation routing behavior with high ecological validity, but there are little publicly available data. We generated a highway vehicle routing dataset derived f...

The threat of wildfires is increasing at an alarming rate due to climate change and the expansion of the wildland-urban interface. It is critical to improve understanding of people’s evacuation decisions during wildfire emergencies. Therefore, this study proposes a novel methodology to model evacuation rates using large-scale GPS data generated by...

An active shooting emergency requires an effective strategy to increase the chances of survival of the attacked population. Educational environments are one of the most common locations of such events. To reduce the impact of these disasters, several emergency plans have been developed and put in place. Traditionally, these emergency plans are taug...

Urban-scale evacuation may take place because of disasters or emergencies. Efforts have been made to enhance the preparedness of communities for urban-scale evacuation. For instance, wayfinding systems are installed and implemented in tsunami-prone regions, indicating the evacuation routes to high ground or inland. However, communities tend not to...

The economic, social, and environmental losses from earthquakes caused a significant amount of efforts in enhancing risk assessment of natural hazards in the past few years. Earthquakes bring varying levels of structural and non-structural damage. Many damage assessment tools have been introduced and adopted by engineers to facilitate the recovery...

The productivity and progress tracking systems are currently used in construction projects to acquire the site works data and converting to various digital reports. To date, capturing and transferring data processes are slow or inefficient because significant human errors occur in the process. Therefore, project managers can omit critical informati...

Terrorist attacks have become more frequent and more deadly in recent decades. Understanding the movement responses of the individuals involved can save lives. Using pedestrian dynamics to predict responses to such attacks could be hugely beneficial to the survival of those involved. However, given the lack of appropriate data, it is not currently...

Modern experiments investigating human behaviour in emergencies are often implemented in virtual reality (VR), due to the increased experimental control and improved ethical viability over physical reality (PR). However, there remain questions regarding the validity of the results obtained from these environments, and no full validation of VR exper...

The threat of wildfires is increasing at an alarming rate due to climate change and the expansion of the wildland-urban interface. It's more important now than ever for emergency officials to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of wildfire evacuations. One important area of research is to better understand people's evacuation decisions during...

Performance-based fire design can be carried out by comparing results from fire simulations and evacuation simulations. Simulating evacuation of buildings requires engineers to have access to several sets of evacuation data, including occupant travel speeds, flow rates, and pre-evacuation time. Especially in building types where people may take lon...

Floods are among the most frequent natural hazards, and flood risk management is a paramount task when planning solutions to reduce their impact on communities. In the last decades, policy makers' actions for flood risk management have been redirected from purely physical self-protective measures towards integrated management strategies by includin...

Recently, wildfires have created severe challenges for fire and emergency services and communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). To reduce wildfire risk and enhance the safety of WUI communities, improving our understanding of wildfire evacuation is a pressing need. This study proposes a new methodology to analyze wildfire evacuation by le...

One of the key implications of COVID-19 is the adoption of physical distancing provisions to minimise the risk of virus transmission. Physical distancing can have significant consequences on crowd movement both in normal conditions and during emergencies. The impact of physical distancing is discussed in this chapter by first presenting an overview...

Motivation: The productivity and progress tracking systems are currently used in construction projects to acquire the site works data and converting to various digital reports. Knowledge gap: To date, capturing and transferring data processes are slow or inefficient because significant human errors occur in the process. Therefore, project managers...

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a sharing platform that can present a parametric 3D model with various project information in the form of a digital display. In recent years, BIM adoption has become increasing globally as the Architectural, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry has recognised its benefits. Meanwhile, many challenges of BI...

Schools are major trip generators in urban areas and school trips may largely contribute to the congestion, particularly during morning peak hours. This study investigates the home-to-school trip mode choices in Kandy city, which is a major city in Sri Lanka. The data were collected through a questionnaire survey distributed among junior, lower sen...

In the event of a fire emergency in the built environment, occupants face a range of evacuation decisions, including the choice of exits. An important question from the standpoint of evacuation safety is how evacuees make these choices and what factors affect their choices. Understanding how humans weigh these (often) competing factors is essential...

Communities around the world are increasingly exposed to larger and more intense wildfires. A common method that officials use to protect community members from harm is evacuation. Data on how people behave during wildfires is critical when planning for evacuation and deciding when and how to evacuate entire communities during an event. Using a sim...

With increased frequency and intensity due to climate change, wildfires have become a growing global concern. This creates severe challenges for fire and emergency services as well as communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). To reduce wildfire risk and enhance the safety of WUI communities, improving our understanding of wildfire evacuati...

As wildfires become increasingly more prevalent and severe in California, it is imperative to study how people respond to wildfire events. To support the development of more accurate wildfire evacuation simulations, this project publishes the first dataset to capture highway vehicle routing behavior during the 2019 Kincade Fire, Sonoma County, Cali...

Metro systems are playing an essential role in transiting large passenger flows in metropolitan areas. Since commuting with Metro systems is beneficial from cost and time-consuming aspects, a vast number of people use this mode of transport. The high density of passengers in Metro stations during rush hours raises the significance of considering pr...