Building-evacuation-route planning via time-expanded process-network synthesis

A method and software are proposed for optimal building-evacuation-route planning in terms of identifying evacuation routes and scheduling of evacuees on each route. First, the building-evacuation routes are represented by a P-graph, which gives rise to a time-expanded process-network synthesis (PNST) problem that can be algorithmically solved by the P-graph framework. In the proposed method, each location and passage in the building is given by a set of attributes to be taken into account in the evacuation-route planning. The evacuation time is calculated as a minimum cost of the corresponding PNST. In addition to the globally optimal solution, the P-graph framework provides the n-best sub-optimal solutions. The validity of the proposed method is illustrated by two examples.