The role of communication in emergency evacuations: An analysis of a ring network with a static disruption

Whilst technology has advanced rapidly over the last few decades, emergency evacuation procedures have not kept up-to-date with this technological progress. This paper explores the benefits of information and communication for agents in a simple ring network. The majority of the existing literature focuses on using agent-based simulation models to predict outcomes. One of the major benefits of this technique is that it allows the incorporation of many different factors that drive evacuation outcomes; however, simulation-only techniques lack power when attempting to explain the relationship between these factors. This paper provides an analytical framework to derive closed-form solutions for the relationship between the distance travelled to evacuate, the size of the network, the number of agents in the network, the level of information available and the communication broadcast range. Performance is measured using average distances travelled and worst-case analysis.