Emergency Route Planning with the Shortest Path Methods: Static and Dynamic Obstacles

Abstract

In extreme cases, evacuation difficulties could cause casualties in a closed layout during an emergency. The existing emergency routes are designed based on the shortest path to the nearest egress in a vacant layout. This research aims to design an emergency route plan in a realistic closed layout with interior arrangements and crowds as static and dynamic impediments that cause movement divergence and misdirection that affect evacuation time. This research proposes an automated emergency route design using Cellular Automata (CA) based pedestrian simulation in a realistic layout. The simulation was integrated with the Pythagorean Theorem (PT) and Dijkstra's Algorithm (DA) to imitate human exitfinding behaviour during evacuation. The results showed that PT is viable in layouts with static obstacles, requiring 20 % less travel distances and evacuation time than DA with similar experiment sets. However, the DA approach results have become on par with the PT in a layout with dynamic and static obstacles. DA outperforms PT in densely populated regions, while PT outperforms DA in less populated regions.