On the way of integrating evacuation approaches

With the growing pressure on available urban space and the construction of more and more complex building infrastructures, the navigational task for building users is getting increasingly difficult. As people react more impulsive under stressful situations, emergencies can exacerbate way finding problems. Additionally, leadership and familiarity with the (topological structure of a) building can influence the ease of finding appropriate evacuation routes. In research, two separate and distinctive techniques for modelling evacuation paths have been developed: evacuation simulation modelling through complex computer simulations and 3D network modelling based on graph theory. Taking into account a global user perspective, the 3D network modelling approach has the advantage to preserve a close connection with the semantic building structure. Following this approach, existing three dimensional evacuation routing algorithms tend to use Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. However, as more factors, compared to path length, influence evacuation situations, literature acknowledges a void in representing more realistic, complete and accurate emergency situations. This paper presents a first step in creating such integral algorithm by implementing capacity constraints based on user flow control on a 3D geometric network model. In the future additional topics such as zonal partitioning can be added to the algorithm, moving to an integration of both evacuation approaches.

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