Optimal pedestrian evacuation using Model Predictive Control

During an emergency in a building complex, an effective evacuation is essential to avoid crowd disasters. This article presents a route guiding that minimize the evacuation time during the evacuating of pedestrians from a building. A dynamic network model, namely the point queue model, is used to form a linear programming problem whose solution is used as an evacuation plan. By continuously solving the problem using the new state as initial data a feedback control law is derived using Model Predictive Control. The control law is tested on a microscopic pedestrian simulation for a building with five rooms and one respectively two exits. The simulation shows that the control law provides efficient and seemingly optimal, while taking the predicted future distribution of pedestrians along different routes into account. The control law further manages to handle minor errors in the provided layout information.