Combining Building and Behavior Models for Evacuation Planning

Emergency rescue and evacuation planning for complex high-rise buildings has been attracting greater interest from both researchers and practitioners. Simulations can help managers develop effective plans and evaluate scenarios for quickly gathering residents and evacuating affected areas. To help users find optimal rescue and evacuation routes, a proposed approach uses the extended hierarchical node-relation model (EHI-NRM) to represent a building's internal structure. The approach also employs the improved cellular automata model (ICA) to consider route-choice behavior, such as spatial reasoning and communication among evacuees. Experiments show that this approach can greatly reduce rescue and evacuation time.