Problem Decomposition for Evacuation Simulation Using Network Flow

Seán Óg Murphy, Kenneth N. Brown, Cormac J. Sreenan

Abstract: Simulation of building evacuations can be a powerful tool for predicting evacuation outcomes, but for this prediction to be useful it must be produced in a timely manner. The building evacuation outcomes are dependent on the movement decisions of the occupants, but simulating all possible combinations of occupant decisions is infeasible. Our contribution is a novel technique using building structure knowledge in the form of a Network Flow Graph to determine where and when occupants might interact with one another. We decompose the problem into non-interacting groups, to be simulated separately, which leads to a significant simulation workload reduction.