Planning Emergency Movement for the Built Environment

The goal of this project is to investigate methods for finding emergency movement plans in dynamic and uncertain environments, specifically buildings. Current techniques used to solve these problems, like (Opasanon, 2004), make unrealistic assumptions about human behaviour during emergency movement. For example, they assume that occupants travelling through a building do not directly interact, and, therefore, provide instructions that presume people who arrive at a decision point at the same time will split up if told to do so. In practice, it is not clear how this could be implemented and how it would be possible to distribute risk exposure fairly. Furthermore, empirical research on human behaviour during emergency evacuation (for example, (SFPE, 2002)) indicates that people tend to have a social response to evacuation; people act as a group and try to evacuate with people to whom they have some attachment. We explore approaches that model a limited social response in the route planning process.