Capacity constrained hazard awareness navigation in a fire emergency: A heuristic approach

Abstract

We propose a novel heuristic algorithm for directing victims during a fire emergency within a building. We considered the capacity constraints of evacuation paths and the effect of hazard spreading for our algorithm. The main objective of the proposed algorithm is to maximize the number of evacuated victims at each time step. Therefore, we model the evacuation problem as the standard universal maximum flow problem by integrating unavailability of nodes and links over time due to hazardous conditions. The proposed solution is a heuristic approach instead a linear programming method. We compared the performance of our approach against two most relevant alternative heuristic approaches in order to experimentally demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the alternatives.