Effect of exit placement on evacuation plans

TLDR

Human behavior during evacuation, rising crowd‑related disasters, and the need for smooth pedestrian flow and optimal exit placement are key concerns in social science, complex systems research, and architectural planning. This paper investigates how exit placement affects evacuation outcomes in congested pedestrian environments. The authors built an evacuation system with four exit‑arrangement configurations and applied simulated annealing and depth‑first search to identify optimal exit placements. Simulations show that adjacent exits increase crowding and delay evacuation when using a nearest‑exit strategy, whereas simulated annealing consistently balances pedestrian flow and avoids these problems, demonstrating that optimal‑path planning can outperform conventional nearest‑exit approaches.

Abstract

Human behaviour while trying to escape a room via its main means of egress is an important issue in social science, complex systems research, and architectural planning. Disasters resulting from human crowding have increased in recent years. In such cases, it is important to consider several factors, including the smooth flow of pedestrians and the positions of obstacles and exits. This paper describes the effects of exit placement in environments congested with pedestrians. An evacuation system was designed and implemented with multiple exits in four different arrangements. The system utilised two artificial intelligence (AI) techniques—simulated annealing (SA) and depth-first search (DFS)—to examine the optimal balance between the placements of the various exits. Simulation and experimental results demonstrated that adjacently placed exits resulted in increased crowding at some exits over others when a nearest-exit path technique (DFS) was adopted as the evacuation strategy, resulting in longer evacuation times. Of the two examined evacuation techniques, SA proved superior, as it optimally balanced the pedestrian distribution over all available exits in all scenarios. In addition, the optimal-path technique (SA) did not suffer the ill-effects of adjacent exit placement. The simulation results confirm the importance of developing optimal evacuation plans, which could significantly outperform commonly employed nearest-exit evacuation strategies.