Min-max-flow based algorithm for evacuation network planning in restricted spaces

Abstract

Recently, emergency evacuation management, which is a social work around the world, has been getting lots of attentions due to its importance and necessity. The primary task of emergency evacuation management is evacuation route planning. Considering the particularity of restrict space scenarios, it is more important to guarantee the security and promptness of evacuation routes than that in open space scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a new evacuation route planning problem in restricted spaces, namely Congestion-Avoidable Evacuation Route Network Planning (CA-ERNP) problem. Based on the minimum cost maximum flow (Min-Max Flow) problem, we propose a batch scheduling algorithm based on node-slitting transformation. In addition, we evaluate the average performance of the algorithms via simulation and the results indicate the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing alternatives in terms of efficiency and time cost.