A New Escape Routing Strategy for Controlling Evacuation from Buildings

This paper proposes an approach for managing crowd evacuation from buildings. The work is motivated by the consideration that chaotic collective motion is a main reason for injuries and deaths during egress in emergency situations. Egress performance can be improved by real time adaptation of escape routes depending on feedback from the real scenario, considering crowd distribution and occurrence of random events. The proposed routing strategy aims at reducing the total egress time by driving individuals towards less congested exits, and is based on the comparison between the predicted evacuation time from each exit. Simulation performed on a simple case study by a commercial software illustrates the feasibility of the approach.