A Two-Stage Method for Building Evacuation With Discrete Time Model

This paper analyzes the evacuation process of people in a building, and constructs a discrete-time evacuation model that can accurately describe the evacuation problem according to evacuation scenarios. In the discrete time framework, the evacuation policy is dynamically adjusted based on the dynamic transfer of people. For the large-scale evacuation problem, this paper proposes a two-stage method to solve the evacuation policy of edge and node separately, which improves the solving efficiency. The results of case study prove the reliability and efficiency of our method. Note to Practitioners—In this paper, considering the influence of effective edge width and crowd density on the moving speed of people, a discrete time based evacuation model is constructed which accurately reflects the evacuation process. A two-stage method is proposed to solve the difficult problem of large-scale evacuation. The evacuation policy obtained by the two-stage method will be used as the evacuation plan, and the evacuation plan of different evacuation scenarios will be counted. When an evacuation event occurs, the distribution of people is matched with the scenario in the database, and the evacuation plan of the closest scenario is selected for evacuation.