A Novel Approach for Developing Emergency Evacuation Plans

In case of a disaster, planning for pedestrian evacuation from buildings is a major issue since it threatens human lives. To cope with this problem, evacuation plans are developed to ensure efficient evacuation in minimum time. These plans can be very sophisticated according to the complexity of the evacuation environment. This advocates the use of architectures such as Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to develop the evacuation plans before happening of a real accident. Since developing an evacuation plan using MAS requires considerable effort, finding more efficient approaches is still an open problem. This paper introduces a new approach, based on the model-driven principles, to support developing evacuation plans. The approach includes utilizing a graphical editor for designing evacuation models, automatic generation of the evacuation plan code, as well as running the generated code on a MAS platform. We evaluated our approach using a case study. The results show that our approach provides elevated speed, less effort, high abstraction level, and more flexibility and productivity in developing emergency evacuation plans.