System optimum during the evacuation of pedestrians from a building: A minor field study.

• Main Author: Blom Göransson, Oskar
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Matematik (Inst.) 2012
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-103198

During an emergency in a building complex, an effective evacuation is essentialto avoid crowd disasters. The evacuation efficiency could be enhanced both bychanging the layout of the building, and by changing the route guiding given tothe evacuating pedestrians. This thesis considers how to guide the evacuatingpedestrians so that the evacuation time is minimised.In this thesis, a dynamic network model, namely the point queue model, isused to form a linear programming problem whose solution is used to create anevacuation plan. By continuously updating the initial data in this model andsolving the problem with this new data, a feedback based control law is derivedbased on Model Predictive Control.The control law is tested on a simulation of the social force model for abuilding with five rooms and one respectively two exits. The result shows thatthe control law manages to efficiently guide the pedestrians out of the building,taking the varying distribution of pedestrians into account. The control lawfurther manages to handle minor errors in the layout information.                       Keywords. Evacuation modelling, pedestrian dynamics, optimal control