Evacuation Modeling From the Control Perspective and Corresponding Sequential-Based Optimal Evacuation Guidance

Most of the emergency alert systems to date can only produce alarm sounds and remind people not to use elevators. Without effective guidance information, it is highly possible that people will rush into certain staircases, which may, however, result in stampedes, crushing, and trampling. To increase people's survivability and mitigate the losses when disasters happen, it is desirable that the future emergency alert system is capable of providing guidance information to people in real time. In this brief, a new scalable evacuation model is proposed from the control perspective. The partial decoupling characteristic of the model leads to a sequential approach in the optimal guidance design so that the computational cost can be significantly reduced as compared with the centralized approach. It is shown that the sequential approach can achieve the same minimum time performance, although the optimal guidance may only be one of the many solutions. Characteristics of the proposed model and the capabilities of the associated optimization methods are illustrated through simulations.