Human behaviour in fire guest lecture featuring Oasys MassMotion at Birmingham City University

Back in February 2023, Dr Michael Kinsey, gave a guest lecture about human behaviour in fire and methods of application as part of the new BEng Fire Engineering apprentice course at Birmingham City University (BCU). This new degree course is one of a few of essential fire engineering programs in the United Kingdom.

The lecture included an introduction to Oasys MassMotion and a tutorial showing the Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) students how to build their first MassMotion evacuation model. Oasys provided the required licenses to both the lecturer and all the students to ensure they were able to engage with the software and learn as efficiently as possible. Michael explained that he used MassMotion for this lecture because…

“It provides great examples of modern-day evacuation models used in industry which demonstrates the key concepts of evacuation modelling to students.”

Michael has used MassMotion in his lectures for over eight years, he is proficient in the full extent of its advanced capabilities, including some of the new features, as he explains in this LinkedIn post covering the script object tool.

MassMotion allows designers to understand the impact of human movement in spaces and thus, reduces the risks in the design stages of a project, allowing for multiple scenarios to be tested withdrawing the need for any costly, time-consuming real-world trials. The software provides designers with the confidence to design safer buildings through effectively modelling evacuation scenarios that can be tested to assess the performance of the evacuation provision. Find out more in this case study.

Feeding back from the lecture, Senior Lecturer in Fire Engineering at the BCU, Dr Xu Dai, told us, “The FSE apprentices at BCU really enjoyed the teaching delivered by Dr Michael Kinsey, and the MassMotion software impressed the apprentices from different FSE industry practices and fire services.”

We would like to thank Xu Dai and Michael for choosing MassMotion as the choice of evacuation modelling software for this course and for kindly sharing this information with us.