Dynamic crowd evacuation approach for the emergency route planning problem: Application to case studies

Disastrous situations, either natural or man-made, have claimed countless lives. In a planning context, this triggers the need for an evacuation situation that involves the emergency route planning (ERP) problem. ERP emphasizes the effectiveness of the evacuation plan to mitigate risk and ensure crowd safety. Reviews on previous ERP works have elicited a plethora of approaches, such as decision support, exact, heuristic, and meta-heuristic approaches. However, previous works on ERP focused on either crowd modeling techniques or routing approaches, but not both. This elicits the need to bridge modeling and routing approaches by means of a dynamic concept. To capture this dynamism concept, group cohesiveness and flexible routing approaches have been proposed, namely as an integrated evacuation planning with dynamism (iEvaP+). Group cohesiveness is utilized by considering group structure and intra-group compliance. Meanwhile, an artificial immune system (AIS) algorithm is adopted as the route optimizer. The iEvaP+ approach is applied to three case studies in order to identify the impact of crowd dynamism in the ERP problem. The result indicates that dynamism has direct influence on the evacuation plan performance. Besides the group cohesiveness, the properties of the evacuation network (such as exit) are also important in mitigating risks and crowd survivability.