Minimizing the evacuation time of a crowd from a complex building using rescue guides
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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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Date
2022-05-15
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Mcode
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Language
en
Pages
20
Series
Physica A, Volume 594
Abstract
In an emergency situation, the evacuation of a large crowd from a complex building can become slow or even dangerous without a working evacuation plan. The use of rescue guides that lead the crowd out of the building can improve the evacuation efficiency. An important issue is how to choose the number, positions, and exit assignments of these guides to minimize the evacuation time of the crowd. Here, we model the evacuating crowd as a multi-agent system with the social force model and simple interaction rules for guides and their followers. We formulate the problem of minimizing the evacuation time using rescue guides as a stochastic optimization problem. Then, we solve it with a procedure combining numerical simulation and a genetic algorithm (GA). The GA iteratively searches for the optimal evacuation plan, while numerical simulations evaluate the evacuation time of the plans. We apply the procedure on a test case and on an evacuation of a fictional conference building. The procedure is able to solve the number of guides, their initial positions and exit assignments in a single although complicated optimization. The attained results show that the procedure converges to an optimal evacuation plan, which minimizes the evacuation time and mitigates congestion and the effect of random deviations in agents’ motion.Description
Funding Information: This study was first funded by a grant from the Foundation for Aalto University, Finland Science and Technology, and later with a grant from the Finnish Science Foundation for Technology and Economics, Finland . The calculations in this study were performed using computer resources within the Aalto University School of Science “Science-IT” project. We wish to thank our summer assistant Jaan Tollander de Balsch, who considerably helped us develop the simulation codes. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s)
Keywords
Evacuation, Genetic algorithm, Multi-agent system, Numerical simulation, Stochastic optimization
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Citation
von Schantz, A & Ehtamo, H 2022, ' Minimizing the evacuation time of a crowd from a complex building using rescue guides ', Physica A, vol. 594, 127011 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2022.127011