Enhance Simulation Software Accessibility through Remodeling User Interface Focusing on Higher Education Students

Abstract

Technology has been increasingly implemented as an effective tool to help improve student’s ability to comprehend their environment, develop design solutions and estimate the appropriateness of their proposed designs. Through simulations, the students can visualize the performance of their design and anticipate unexpected complications. Technologies have also been proven as a useful tool to help higher education student’s grasp disaster situations outbreak and their consequences. Among the field of disaster mitigation and prevention, the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) has been described as an adequate tool to simulate flame spread rate during fire outbreaks, as well as smoke flow. However, this tool is not considered accessible to students because of its elaborated features that can be challenging to understand and time-consuming to render. The EDISON Platform, a hub that provides accessible simulation solutions for students free of charge, was used as the host to create the Graphical User Interface (GUI) FDS Module. The proposal implemented a GUI for the FDS tool, facilitating the simulation process while addressing three main challenges for students to access the existing version of FDS. The current FDS version requires programming logic understanding from the users. For example, the construction of the FDS files is based on Namelists and Command Line Interface (CLI) is used to render the model. Furthermore, three different environments are needed to complete each simulation. In the suggested GUI FDS Module, all the procedures required for simulation completion can be done within one environment and no programming knowledge is necessary. Secondly, since the GUI FDS Module runs the simulation on the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) supercomputer, the simulation is expected to be done faster than if rendered using the student’s personal computer. Finally, even though the current version of FDS is downloadable without any charge, it is common that users find the FDS excessively complicated and select one of the available commercial GUI versions of FDS when doing fire assessment and research. The proposed GUI FDS Module will provide an FDS GUI option free of charge and open to the community, focused on higher degree students.