In building emergency evacuation, the perception of hazard can stress crowd, arouse their competitive behaviors, and trigger disorder and blocking as they pass a narrow exit. This is a serious concern threatening evacuees' survivability and egress efficiency. How to optimally guide crowd considering such effect is a critical problem. Based on advanced simulation, behavioral studies and psychological findings, this paper establishes a novel egress model, where a hazard event (e.g., fires) arouses a desire of crowd movement - the desired flow rate. The undesired event of disorder and blocking is then captured as desired flow rate exceeds the allowable rate as specified by the passage capacity, resulting in a drastic decrease of crowd movement in a nonlinear and probabilistic fashion. To optimally select passages to guide the crowd, a divide-and-conquer method is developed, where evacuees are divided in groups, and escape route for each group is optimized and then coordinated with others so that the limited passage capacities are shared to meet their total desire of joint movement. Numerical testing and simulation demonstrate that, compared with the empirical method of using the nearest exit, our optimized solution can evacuate more people and faster by preventing or mitigating potential disorder and blocking in building egress.
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1. P. Wang, P. B. Luh, S. C. Chang, J. Sun, "Modeling and Optimization of Crowd Guidance for Building Emergency Evacuation," Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, Washington, D.C., August 2008. [Download]
- Testing Results (Simulation by FDS+Evac 5.25)
1. Example 1:
Using the Nearest Exits [Download]
Using the Optimized Strategy [Download]
2. Example 2:
Using the Nearest Exits [Download]
Using the Optimized Strategy [Download]
