Comparing dynamic evacuation control strategies for emergency situations

A comparative study of dynamic evacuation control strategies for emergency situations such as fires or earthquakes is presented. Due to the changing nature of emergency situations, there is a clear need for generating dynamic evacuation plans that consider ongoing situations like hazardous areas or amount and location of evacuees. In this paper we show how automatic control can contribute to address this problem, therefore we compare open loop and closed loop strategies, and decentralized, distributed and centralized approaches. Evacuation performance is measured through the total evacuation time in a one story building with three exits, considering different levels of hazard and congestion. Results show that real time measurements of hazard and congestion incorporate valuable information to the control system, and also that distributed control strategies seem to be more suitable for addressing the problem due to their low computational cost and good performance.