A visual analytics system for route planning and emergency crowd evacuation

Abstract

Emergency evacuation from crowded public spaces is of great importance to all authorities around the world. Many systems have been developed by researchers to address the optimization of emergency evacuation routing and planning. This paper presents a visual analytics system for route planning and emergency crowd evacuation; a web-based visualization and simulation system that allows stakeholders to develop and assess route planning and evacuation procedures for emergency scenarios. The system takes advantage of the available OpenStreetMap comprehensive spatial database to enable users to implement evacuation scenarios in almost anywhere OpenStreetMap dataset is available. Using multiple infrastructure-specific varying scenarios, such as adjusting capacities of roads/pathways or their closure, the tool can identify bottleneck areas thus allowing the assessment of potential improvements to pedestrian and transportation network to relieve the bottleneck and improve evacuation time. As a case study, we use this system for the city of Makkah in Saudi Arabia and the city of Minnesota in the United States.