Pedestrian evacuation route plan using existing optimal exit selection algorithms

Abstract

The optimal exit selection by the pedestrians is important especially for the evacuation process during panic situation to reduce casualties. Nowadays, the efficiency of the evacuation process had become one of the issues during emergency incidents due to the difficulties faced by the pedestrians to access the exit points and the formation of clogging region near to the exit points and narrow pathways. Hence, the simulation of the pedestrian evacuation had been introduced as the potential solution exploration by imitating the emergency situations for predicting the survival rate and the casualties of the pedestrians involved. The pedestrian movement in the simulation will construct the movement patterns that are able to assist the development of the emergency route plan for guiding the pedestrians to find the nearest exit to escape. However, the route plan designed based on the ordinary pedestrian movement simulation will highlight the nearest exit instead of the optimal safest exit for the pedestrian to evacuate safely. Hence, to design a low-risk exit selection, this research had made a survey on three existing algorithms to optimize the exit selection process; multi-agent based algorithm, least effort algorithm and game theory algorithm. The experiments were conducted with three different structural layouts (number of doors) with variety number of dataset (number of pedestrians). The result of this research had shown that the game theory algorithm was able to assist the pedestrian movement towards the optimal nearest and safest exit for evacuation process and capable to enhance the simulation for designing a feasible emergency route plan to reduce casualties.