Generating Emergency Evacuation Route Directions Based on Crowd Simulations With Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

In an emergency, it is vital to evacuate individuals from the dangerous environments. Emergency evacuation plan-ning ensures that the evacuation is safe and optimal in terms of evacuation time for all of the people in evacuation. To this end, the computer-enabled evacuation simulation systems are used to generate optimal routes for the evacuees. In this paper, a dynamic emergency evacuation route generator has been proposed based on indoor plans of the building and the locations of the evacuees. To generate the optimal routes in real-time, a reinforcement learning algorithm (proximal policy optimization) is presented. Comparative performance results show that the proposed model is successful for evacuating the individuals from the building in different scenarios. © 2022 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.