Indoor guided evacuation: TIN for graph generation and crowd evacuation

Abstract

This paper presents two complementary methods: an approach to compute a network data-set for indoor space of a building by using its two-dimensional (2D) floor plans and limited semantic information, combined with an optimal crowd evacuation method. The approach includes three steps: (1) generate critical points in the space, (2) connect neighbour points to build up the network, and then (3) run the optimal algorithm for optimal crowd evacuation from a room to the exit gates of the building. Triangulated Irregular Network (TIN) is used in the first two steps. The optimal evacuation crowd is not based on the nearest evacuation gate for a person but relies on optimal sorting of the waiting lists at each gate of the room to be evacuated. As an example case, a rectangular room with 52 persons with two gates is evacuated in 102 elementary interval times (one interval corresponds to the time for one step for normal velocity walking), whereas it would have been evacuated in not less than 167 elementary steps. The procedure for generating the customized network involves the use of 2D floor plans of a building and some common Geographic Information System (GIS) functions. This method combined with the optimal sorting lists will be helpful for guiding crowd evacuation during any emergency.

A Critical Review of the Integration of Geographic Information System and Building Information Modelling at the Data Level

“…This has brought problems for some applications. In the case of creating an indoor evacuation network, the lack of corresponding connection information between stairs makes it difficult to create geometric links between them and impedes the ability to navigate between floors [54]. The semantic loss often happens on the GIS side, as IFC contains much more information than CityGML.…”

“…Nevertheless, semantics could be attached to it through an external database. Overall, for theoretical study purposes, CityGML is more often studied [51][52][53], while for practical purposes, multipatch is more often adopted [33,54,55].…”

Trends and Opportunities of BIM-GIS Integration in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industry: A Review from a Spatio-Temporal Statistical Perspective

“…BIM-GIS integration is to integrate the strong parts of both BIM and GIS for building and city modelling. During the past ten years, BIM-GIS integration has been applied on multiple cases such as visualization of construction supply chain management [15], emergency response [16][17][18], urban energy assessment and management [19][20][21], heritage protection [22,23], climate adaption [24] and ecological assessment [25].…”

A dynamic approach for evacuees' distribution and optimal routing in hazardous environments

“…It helps to determine densities of objects in certain areas and, thus, used to detect congestions and bottlenecks [4]. In order to perform such analysis it is necessary to generate a navigable network and apply a path-finding algorithm [2,6,11,14,16,17].…”