Abstract
The lonelier evacuees find themselves, the riskier become their wayfinding decisions. This research supports single evacuees in a dynamically changing environment with risk-aware guidance. It deploys the concept of decentralized evacuation, where evacuees are guided by smartphones acquiring environmental knowledge and risk information via exploration and knowledge sharing by peer-to-peer communication. Peer-to-peer communication, however, relies on the chance that people come into communication range with each other. This chance can be low. To bridge between people being not at the same time at the same places, this paper suggests information depositories at strategic locations to improve information sharing. Information depositories collect the knowledge acquired by the smartphones of evacuees passing by, maintain this information, and convey it to other passing-by evacuees. Multi-agent simulation implementing these depositories in an indoor environment shows that integrating depositories improves evacuation performance: It enhances the risk awareness and consequently increases the chance that people survive and reduces their evacuation time. For evacuating dynamic events, deploying depositories at staircases has been shown more effective than deploying them in corridors.
Highlights
When disasters strike, such as a fire, a gas leak, a chemical spill, an earthquake, a flooding, or a roaming sniper, the first and foremost action is to get people out of the disaster area
To bridge the spatial and temporal gaps in the communication of single evacuees in decentralized evacuations, and inspired by ants that communicate by pheromone traces that keep being updated by passers-by, this paper suggests information depositories in the field for decentralized evacuation
The figures show the numbers of simulated emergency cases where one evacuation strategy has saved more evacuees than another evacuation strategy, and the figures in parentheses represent the numbers of the more evacuees saved per case
Summary
When disasters strike, such as a fire, a gas leak, a chemical spill, an earthquake, a flooding, or a roaming sniper, the first and foremost action is to get people out of the disaster area. Environmental knowledge, knowledge about the dynamically changing event, and some risk awareness in their decision making is essential [1]. For these situations, decentralized evacuation has been embraced by recent research due to its robustness and scalability [2,3]. In decentralized evacuations evacuees are guided by their smartphones that are acquiring environmental knowledge and risk information as the evacuees explore the environment. These smartphones are sharing their collected knowledge by peer-to-peer communication with other smartphones within communication range. The chance that evacuees encounter may be low due to the following facts
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