Spatial planning for Effective Evacuation using Floor Field Cellular Automata Model

Evacuation is one of the most critical situation that can affect people safety. It involves pedestrians and the environment which may consist of objects, walls and exit. In order to improve the safety of pedestrians during the evacuation process the architects and the interior designers must increase the efficiency of the produced layout to facilitate pedestrians escape. Our system is developed to help introduce the best layout among alternative layouts generated by the system. The concept of layout generation is based on the move operator which is used to generate new layout by moving the obstacles to appropriate places. Depending on the comparison between the different layouts based on their flow rate values, the best layout will be generated. In this paper, we discuss the use of static floor field model which is one of the cellular automata approaches to model pedestrian movement during the evacuation process and a set of objects. The floor-field will allow us to find a path from two nodes in a Moore neighborhood moving in all eight possible cells. The generated statistics are used to find a feasible layout that reduce the risk of pedestrian harm.