Evacuation Networks

| Planning and design of evacuation networks is both a complex and critically important optimization problem for a number of emergency situations. One particularly critical class of examples concerns the emergency evacuation of chemical plants, high-rise buildings, and naval vessels due to re, explosion or other emergencies. The problem is compounded because the solution must take into account the fact that human occupants may panic during the evacuation, therfore, there must be a well-de ned set of evacuation routes in order to minimize the sense of panic and at the same time create safe, e ective routes for evacuation. The problem is a highly transient, stochastic, nonlinear, combinatorial optimization programming problem. We focus on evacuation networks where congestion is a signi cant problem.