Identifying evacuation routes via the P-graph methodology

In this work, we propose a method and its concomitant software for the identification and assessment of building-evacuation routes. First, the building floor map is represented via P-graphs, thereby facilitating the identification of the evacuation routes. Second, each route identified is transformed into a time-expanded, process-network synthesis (PNS_T) problem, which can be algorithmically solved by the P-graph methodology. In the proposed method, each location and passage in the building is defined by a set of attributes to be taken into account in the evacuation-route planning. Third, the evacuation routes are ranked in terms of the evacuation time computed as the minimum cost of the corresponding PNS_T problem. Furthermore, the evacuation routes can be ranked according to specific criteria (e.g., bottlenecks, route utilization, etc.).