Minsoo Jang, Kyungshik Lim

KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems, Vol. 5, No. 7, pp. 159-172, Jul. 2016
10.3745/KTCCS.2016.5.7.159,   PDF Download:
Keywords: Evacuation, Indoor Navigation, routing algorithm, Load-Balance
Abstract

This paper presents a novel algorithm for searching evacuation paths in indoor disaster environments. The proposed method significantly improves the time complexity to find the paths to the evacuation exit by introducing a light-weight Disaster Evacuation Graph (DEG) for a building in terms of the size of the graph. With the DEG, the method also considers load balancing and bottleneck capacity of the paths to the evacuation exit simultaneously. The behavior of the algorithm consists of two phases: horizontal tiering (HT) and vertical tiering (VT). The HT phase finds a possible optimal path from anywhere of a specific floor to the evacuation stairs of the floor. Thus, after finishing the HT phases of all floors in parallel the VT phase begins to integrate all results from the previous HT phases to determine a evacuation path from anywhere of a floor to the safety zone of the building that could be the entrance or the roof of the building. It should be noted that the path produced by the algorithm. And, in order to define the range of graph to process, tiering scheme is used. In order to test the performance of the method, computing times and evacuation times are compared to the existing path searching algorithms. The result shows the proposed method is better than the existing algorithms in terms of the computing time and evacuation time. It is useful in a large-scale building to find the evacuation routes for evacuees quickly.

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