Emergency Evacuation Guidance Design for Complex Building Geometries

The planning for pedestrian evacuation in large public-gathering buildings is important because pedestrians are vulnerable to various types of emergency events. One of the most critical measures of the preparedness of a building during these events is its evacuation guidance. This paper proposes a method for designing evacuation guidance systems in complex building spaces by solving a maximum-coverage problem with side constraints of number of signs and evacuation routes. The solution of the problem is difficult to find in general, so the problem is solved in two steps. The first step generates an ideal evacuation guidance system with an unlimited number of signs. In the second step, the ideal system is reduced to the actual guidance system with a reasonable number of signs by constraining the number of signs and maximizing the sign coverage. There are two reasons for using the ideal system as a basis for generating the actual guidance system. First, the solution space of the maximum-coverage problem is greatly restricted by limiting the sign installation choices to the candidate locations found in the ideal system. Second, calculating evacuation routes for the actual system is not necessary because the routes are readily available from the ideal guidance system. Finally, an example based on a transportation terminal is presented to validate the methodology. The results show that the proposed methodology is effective and can be used for supporting emergency evacuation planning for buildings. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)IS.1943-555X.0000080. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.