INFED: Enhancing fire evacuation dynamics through 3D congestion-aware indoor navigation framework

This paper introduces Indoor Navigation Framework for Fire Evacuation Dynamics (INFED), a novel indoor navigation framework that combines dynamic fire constraints and path congestion management. INFED considers the three-dimensional (3D) attributes of both the agents (speed, volume, location, count) and the environment (3D volume, congestion, corridor height, and corridor length) to estimate navigation routes that avoid fire-affected evacuation paths. It achieves this by integrating various proposed algorithms as modules: Environment Establisher, Fired/Safe Node Identifier, Pre-processor, Weighted Graph Generator, and Path Generator. The 3D features of the agent and environment are used to effectively estimate the capacity of the corridors in an indoor environment for the estimation of path congestion. The path congestion so computed is used during evacuation to identify the safest and congestion-free path. We discuss the performance of INFED by implementing it on various realistic scenarios in a commercial floor setup. We found that the incorporation of safety constraints results in longer evacuation routes, ranging from a 6% increase under mild fire and congestion conditions to a 40% increase under severe fire and congestion conditions. In the event of a worst-case scenario where fire-free paths are scarce, INFED utilizes congestion to reduce agent speed along the recommended evacuation route. This mechanism is activated when congestion surpasses a threshold of 0.3. The system can be used by stakeholders to test various evacuation hypotheses, which can lead to better preparedness and rescue operations, ultimately saving lives in the event of a fire.