Integrating decentralized indoor evacuation with information depositories in the field

Abstract

The lonelier evacuees find themselves, the riskier become their wayfinding decisions. This research supports single evacuees in a dynamically changing environment with risk-aware guidance. It deploys the concept of decentralized evacuation, where evacuees are guided by smartphones acquiring environmental knowledge and risk information via exploration and knowledge sharing by peer-to-peer communication. Peer-to-peer communication, however, relies on the chance that people come into communication range with each other. This chance can be low. To bridge between people being not at the same time at the same places, this paper suggests information depositories at strategic locations to improve information sharing. Information depositories collect the knowledge acquired by the smartphones of evacuees passing by, maintain this information, and convey it to other passing-by evacuees. Multi-agent simulation implementing these depositories in an indoor environment shows that integrating depositories improves evacuation performance: It enhances the risk awareness and consequently increases the chance that people survive and reduces their evacuation time. For evacuating dynamic events, deploying depositories at staircases has been shown more effective than deploying them in corridors.