Emergency Evacuation Guidance Design for Complex Building Geometries

AbstractThe planning for pedestrian evacuation in large public-gathering buildings is important because pedestrians are vulnerable to various types of emergency events. One of the most critical measures of the preparedness of a building during these events is its evacuation guidance. This paper proposes a method for designing evacuation guidance systems in complex building spaces by solving a maximum-coverage problem with side constraints of number of signs and evacuation routes. The solution of the problem is difficult to find in general, so the problem is solved in two steps. The first step generates an ideal evacuation guidance system with an unlimited number of signs. In the second step, the ideal system is reduced to the actual guidance system with a reasonable number of signs by constraining the number of signs and maximizing the sign coverage. There are two reasons for using the ideal system as a basis for generating the actual guidance system. First, the solution space of the maximum-coverage prob...

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