Graph and analytical models for emergency evacuation

Abstract

Cyber-Physical-Human Systems (CPHS) combine sensing, communication and control to obtain desirable outcomes in physical environments for human beings, such as buildings or vehicles. A particularly important application area is emergency management. While recent work on the design and optimisation of emergency management schemes has relied essentially on discrete event simulation, which is challenged by the substantial amount of programming or reprogramming of the simulation tools and by the scalability and the computing time needed to obtain useful performance estimates, this paper proposes an approach that offers fast estimates based on graph models and probability models. We show that graph models can offer insight into the critical areas in an emergency evacuation and that they can suggest locations where sensor systems are particularly important and may require hardening. On the other hand, we also show that analytical models based on queueing theory can provide useful estimates of evacuation times and for routing optimisation. The results are illustrated with regard to the evacuation of a real-life building.

No way out: Emergency evacuation with no internet access

“…Another interesting area is the use of such infrastructure-less communication technologies in the optimum deployment and use of emergency resources [26,27]. Graph theoretical and analytical modelling methods would also prove useful in the identification of critical paths in evacuation [28] and of essential components in emergency support systems [29], and enable fast performance evaluation and more varied parameter studies.…”

Erol Gelenbe: A Career in Multi-Disciplinary Probability Models

“…Since that time, Erol has devoted a part of his research effort to better understanding the ongoing research of emergency management technologies [163,165], and developing a deeper understanding of the appropriate models and algorithms which are specific to this domain of research [27,28,90,164]. Unfortunately, many aspects of emergency management have a significant overlap with tactical planning of military operations [99,160,161] whose purpose is to destroy the capabilities of an adversary but also to save the lives of friendly forces and evacuate the injured of both sides.…”

Emergency Navigation in Confined Spaces Using Dynamic Grouping

“…At the core of these systems, various emergency navigation algorithms have been proposed such as network flow based algorithms [2], [3], queueing model based approaches [4], [5], potential-maintenance algorithms [6], [7], biological-inspired approaches [8], [9], [10]. Network flow based algorithms commonly predict the upper bound of evacuation time and convert the original building model to a time-expanded network by duplicating the original network for each discrete time unit.…”