Indoor evacuation planning

Abstract

Making efficient evacuation plans for large buildings is an important task in operating a large building infrastructure. The plans require a capacitated building network, well-defined exit points, and expected occupancy of a building to analyze evacuation time in different scenarios. Such type of analyses helps us in both the re-design to improve evacuation times as well as for creating more optimal allocations of the building spaces. In this chapter, we model the problems in the following two different types of situations and present heuristic algorithms which are extensions of the existing capacity-constrained route planner (CCRP) algorithm: (i) Additional exits with ladders need to be placed for faster evacuation, and (ii) all evacuees cannot be evacuated by themselves and require help from rescuers. For large and complex buildings, it is difficult to model indoor network and understand an evacuation plan for different scenarios without any user interactive interface. We have designed an evacuation planner which is publicly available and can be used for making indoor network from floor images, creating multiple scenarios, computing evacuation plans of these scenarios, and performing sensitivity analyses of an evacuation plan to evacuees’ behavior.