Escape planning in realistic fire scenarios with Ant Colony Optimisation

Abstract

An emergency requiring evacuation is a chaotic event, filled with uncertainties both for the people affected and rescuers. The evacuees are often left to themselves for navigation to the escape area. The chaotic situation increases when predefined escape routes are blocked by a hazard, and there is a need to re-think which escape route is safest. This paper addresses automatically finding the safest escape routes in emergency situations in large buildings or ships with imperfect knowledge of the hazards. The proposed solution, based on Ant Colony Optimisation, suggests a near optimal escape plan for every affected person — considering dynamic spread of fires, movability impairments caused by the hazards and faulty unreliable data. Special focus in this paper is on empirical tests for the proposed algorithms. This paper brings together the Ant Colony approach with a realistic fire dynamics simulator, and shows that the proposed solution is not only able to outperform comparable alternatives in static and dynamic environments, but also in environments with realistic spreading of fire and smoke causing fatalities. The aim of the solutions is usage by both individuals, such as from a personal smartphone of one of the evacuees, or for emergency personnel trying to assist large groups from remote locations.