Novel Smoke-Aware Individual Evacuation and Congestion-Aware Group Evacuation Algorithms in IoT-Enabled Multi-Story Multi-Exit Buildings

Intelligent Evacuation Sign Control Mechanism in IoT-Enabled Multi-Floor Multi-Exit Buildings

“…The Fire Dynamics Simulator [ 33 ], developed by the United States Department of Commerce’s NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), is a widely recognized tool in fire engineering for simulating the transport of smoke and heat in fires. In a study conducted by [ 8 ], it was confirmed that the smoke danger zone in a large shopping mall is more extensive than the heat danger zone, as demonstrated using FDS simulations.…”

“…PVC ignition usually comes from electric short circuiting. We used the same configurations for the two fire ignitors in the FDS as shown in [ 8 ]. In the FDS, the simulation time is 68 iterations, in which each iteration is 27 s. The total simulation time is 1836 s.…”

“…In [ 15 ], Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm is performed on a server to determine the evacuation route, and a control signal is sent to an 8 8 RGB Arduino matrix panel to show the evacuation direction. An individual evacuation algorithm was proposed for multi-exit, multi-floor buildings based on real-time temperature data [ 9 ] and smoke data [ 8 ] from sensors.…”

“…Constraint (33) specifies that every link at a time slot can be only selected by at most evacuation signs on their evacuation paths. Note that when there is congestion at the evacuation link, the evacuation time will grow exponentially with respect to the number of evacuees at that link [ 8 ]. Hence, by enforcing Constraint (33), we can implicitly prevent longer evacuation times at any link at any time slot .…”

“…IoT-enabled Evacuation Sign Control Mechanism: In the IoT-enabled evacuation approaches in [ 8 , 9 ], the evacuation route is sent to the evacuees’ phones. In other words, the evacuation route can only be sent to occupants who have installed the evacuation app.…”