Priority based Discrete time Dynamic Routing Algorithm for Emergency Evacuation

Abstract

In urban environment evacuation planning is an important requirement for every closed space such as office, hotels, hospitals etc. The existing evacuation research mostly focus on static route planning without considering changing emergency environment. Due to trapped vulnerability of closed spaces, static route planning strategies cannot adapt to changing hazard condition. Thus, it is necessary to design dynamic evacuation routing scheme. In this paper, we propose Priority based Discrete time Dynamic Routing (PDDR) algorithm. It models multisource multi-destination evacuation in closed spaces as a network flow problem, with objective of prioritizing the evacuation of occupants from high risk locations and minimizing the average evacuation time. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm by comparing it with its no priority counterpart Discrete time Dynamic Routing (DDR) algorithm and Static Greedy Routing (SGR) algorithm. The results indicate that PDDR algorithm outperforms both DDR and SGR algorithms.