Distributed swarm evacuation planning

This paper presents a new decentralized approach for evacuating a large number of people from a building using mobile devices which can communicate locally with each other. We investigate the impact of the local communication between the devices on the evacuation by proposing a new distributed evacuation planning algorithm called Distributed Swarm Evacuation Planning. The main challenge in this approach concerns the local communication, which can be unreliable, incomplete, and delayed. Experiments show that we can significantly reduce the evacuation time compared to a modeled panic-like evacuation scenario and that the results are better than those of a shortest-path evacuation plan.