Indoor evacuation routes planning with a grid graph-based model

At present, application of GIS is in a process of transition from macro space to micro space, such as indoor space, a kind of micro environment that has a smaller scale than outdoor space. There have been some applications for indoor space, covering issues like path finding, emergency planning, object tracking, etc. Behind these applications, indoor spatial models are needed to illustrate how built environments are spatially represented. Although some modeling approaches have been proposed, most of them focus only on either structural or topological properties. In view of this problem, recently a grid graph-based modeling approach considering a built environment as a continuous framework is presented, which is able to combine both geometrical and structural properties. In this paper, we employ this approach to implement route analysis based on a hotel floor plan. The result might be applied to the planning for evacuation routes.