Consistency of criteria in building interiors through the analytic hierarchy process for simulation of feasible evacuation routes

Abstract

Disasters can happen anytime in urban areas, forcing people to evacuate buildings to safeguard their lives. Therefore, it is important that safe routes for the transit of people are first identified. However, when defining evacuation routes to safer places, the basic condition considered is the shortest distance, excluding other criteria related to the security of environmental elements. We propose the simulation of feasible evacuation routes under the influence of importance indexes obtained from the validation and consistency of the security criteria of building elements performed by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). We find that the security criteria of building elements can be classified into ranges of a suitability model and validated in comparison matrices with consistency ratios (CR) < 10%, which guarantee data consistency. Furthermore, we obtain the importance indices S(n) interpreted by a variant of the A-star (A*) pathfinding algorithm, showing evacuation routes traced through safe areas, when performing simulations. Our results demonstrate the importance of the consistency of security criteria employed in the AHP, whose indexes highly influence the execution of the variant of the A* pathfinding algorithm when it determines safer rather than shorter evacuation routes, for different simulation scenarios.