Professional Documents
Culture Documents
of Crowd Guidance in
Building Emergency Evacuation
2 /28
Building Emergency Evacuation
l To reduce the egress time the potential disasters such as
stampeding or blocking should prevented.
l Can guidance help?
– Traditional guidance is almost static, and does not consider
how hazard event dynamics affects people’s behavior and
cannot effectively prevent blockings in emergencies
– Our method:
3 /28
Building Emergency Evacuation
l A model which can capture blockings is needed
– The model predicts the potential blockings in the future based
on current information of fires, egress and crowd movement
– Guidance is updated to mitigate or prevent blockings
4 /28
Building Emergency Evacuation
l Existing models
– Crowd movement in
egress is captured by a
network-flow model
where stampeding or
blocking events cannot
be captured
– Helbing’s social-force
model captures blocking
events (faster-is-slower),
but focuses on one-room
scenarios, not in an
egress network
5 /28
Difficulties in Modeling
l To capture blocking events it is necessary to combine
Helbing’s model with the network-flow model?
l Gap exists between the two models
7 /28
A probabilistic graphical model
l The probabilistic graphical model
– Input: Guidance; Output: Crowd flow rate;
– Conditions: Fire status and path capacities
– Links: Conditional probability distribution
8 /28
A probabilistic graphical model
l Faster-is-slower scenario
is achieved in this block
l If Qde Ce , then Qe Qde
with probability 1
l If Q de Ce the probability
of blocking increases as
the difference of Qde and Ce
1 exp d if Qe Ce increases
d Qe Ce
Pr(Qe | Qe , Ce )
exp if Q Q Blc
Qd C e e
e e
where 0
Question: Where is Qed from?
9 /28
A Probabilistic Graphical Model
l Conditional Probability Distribution Pr (Qed| we, sF)
The desired flow rate Qed(t): the number of people desiring to
move out during [ t , t t ]
l If fire becomes closer, people become more impatient, and
the desired flow rate Qed increases in probability sense
10 /28
A probabilistic graphical model
xv: the number of
people in the area v
11 /28
A probabilistic graphical model
l The probabilistic graphical model incorporates two
psychology factors: impatience and trust
– Impatience is the cause of blocking events
– Trust on guidance reflects how guidance changes crowd
behaviors
12 /28
Table Contents
13 /28
Egress Networks
l To incorporate the probabilistic graphical
model into the traditional network-flow
model let us review traditional network-
flow models first
l Review egress network
– Each area is represented by a node, and
the area capacity is ignored because the
bottleneck for crowd movement lies in the
path capacity
– Each path from one area to another is
represented by a directed arc with
specified capacity (persons per time unit)
14 /28
Crowd Flow Equation
A simple example
l Review crowd flow equation
Q1 (t)
l The crowd flow equation is a linear x 1 (t) x 2 (t)
15 /28
Crowd Flow Equation
l Incorporate the probabilistic graphical model into the crowd flow
balance equation the new balance equation is given by
x(t 1) x(t) B Q (t)
x ( t 1) x ( t ) B Q (u ( t ) | s F ( t ), C)
16 /28
Table Contents
17 /28
The Constraints and Objective Function
l Constraints for guidance
– Never guide crowd to an area currently on fire or to be on
fire in near future.
– Guidance constraint is obtained based on prediction of fire
propagation
l The objective function to be maximized is
Cumulative number of people The total number of
evacuated during [0, T] people evacuated
J t 1 t ( x exit ( t 1) x exit ( t )) c T x exit (T )
T
19 /28
Table Contents
20 /28
Solution Methodology
l In our problem the computation complexity is a challenge
– State space is large (the number of occupant in every area)
– The complexity is mainly from the huge state space
l To reduce the computation time Lagrangian Relaxation
(LR) is applied
– decompose overall
way-finding problem into
subproblems
by grouping
occupants
21 /28
Solution Methodology - LR
l How Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) works in our problem
– The joint constraints is the path capacities shared by groups
– Decompose the overall problem by relaxing joint constraints
– Coordinate the solutions of the decomposed problems through
Lagrangian multipliers
Shared capacity Decomposition
x x
Lagrangian Multipers
(Coordination)
22 /28
Solution Methodology - LR
l Joint constraints exist in shared path capacities and are
embedded in the probabilistic graphical model.
l Approximation method is used to relax the joint constraint
23 /28
Solution Methodology - LR
l Approximation method is used to relax the joint constrain
of the path capacities
– First, the original holistic graphical model is separated by
making path capacities go to infinity for subproblems
– Second, a constraint is added to the outputs in the separate
graphical models.
~
Step 1: C e
n
Step 2: e ( t )] C e
E[
i 1
Q (i )
24 /28
Solution Methodology - SDP
l As a result Lagrangian Relaxation can be applied and the
subproblem can be solved by the stochastic dynamic
programming (SDP) with time steps as stages
– SDP looks backward
– SDP yields a NP hard
problem
– In our problem the
computation complexity
is mainly from the large
size of state space
– SDP guarantee the
optimality
25 /28
Solution Methodology - Rollout
26 /28
Solution Methodology - Rollout
l Rollout algorithm for a single group way-finding problem
* ~
u ( k ) arg max E{g k [ x ( k ), u ( k ), w ( k )] Jk 1[f k [ x ( k ), u ( k ), w ( k )]]}
u(k)
28 /28
Thank you