Optimized evacuation route based on crowd simulation

Abstract

An evacuation plan helps people move away from an area or a building. To assist rapid evacuation, we present an algorithm to compute the optimal route for each local region. The idea is to reduce congestion and maximize the number of evacuees arriving at exits in each time span. Our system considers crowd distribution, exit locations, and corridor widths when determining optimal routes. It also simulates crowd movements during route optimization. As a basis, we expect that neighboring crowds who take different evacuation routes should arrive at respective exits at nearly the same time. If this is not the case, our system updates the routes of the slower crowds. As crowd simulation is non-linear, the optimal route is computed in an iterative manner. The system repeats until an optimal state is achieved. In addition to directly computing optimal routes for a situation, our system allows the structure of the situation to be decomposed, and determines the routes in a hierarchical manner. This strategy not only reduces the computational cost but also enables crowds in different regions to evacuate with different priorities. Experimental results, with visualizations, demonstrate the feasibility of our evacuation route optimization method.

LED Wristbands for Cell-Based Crowd Evacuation: An Adaptive Exit-Choice Guidance System Architecture

“…Our use of an MLM model to implement the control logic of cell-based crowd evacuation systems has proven to be very efficient (see [23]). However, as in other existing works on cell-based crowd evacuation systems [1,13,24], little attention has been paid to propose a system architecture based on existing technologies and assuming real communication and positioning infrastructures. In our opinion, these considerations are crucial to boost the real implementation of these systems.…”

“…However, most of this research assumes that a crowd distribution is known in advance, and routes do not adapt to changes during evacuation. For instance, in [10] a multiobjective evacuation route assignment model based on genetic algorithm [11,12] is proposed, while in [13], a shortest path algorithm computes pedestrian routes by iteratively partitioning graph edges at critical division points. Routes are iteratively refined offline until an optimal state is achieved.…”

MAS-Based Evacuation Simulation of an Urban Community during an Urban Rainstorm Disaster in China

“…In micro perspective, simulations have been adopted to model the behaviors of pedestrians in many different situations [32], such as evacuees escaping from a building [33], passengers moving in a rail station [30], and natural disaster management with several types of agent [34][35][36]. In addition, agent models are widely applied to study the behaviors of crowds in the process of evacuation [33,[37][38][39][40] and work out how to improve the efficiency of evacuations [41,42].…”

Transporting objects by multiagent cooperation in crowd simulation

“…Applications of crowd simulations. Crowd simulation techniques have a wide range of applications, such as virtual reality, robot navigation, and crowd evacuation . Our techniques can also be applied in these kinds of applications.…”