Modeling The Wayfinding Queueing Bottleneck in Autonomous Evacuation Navigation System Using Simulation Approaches

Abstract

In the event of an emergency evacuation, wayfinding that is finding the safest and shortest path to the main exit is considered to be a critical problem, especially for unfamiliar occupants. Besides, the time taken to reach the nearby exit will be increased by a variety of bottleneck such as queuing stages. Therefore, a simulation of the occupant evacuation is presented to identify and minimize the queuing bottleneck using an autonomous evacuation navigation system (AENS). AENS is proposed to solve an indoor wayfinding problem because it is independent, reliable and capable of eliminating human as an agent during the emergency evacuation. Thus, this study compares the queuing bottleneck at the door by conducting simulation without and with the AENS using 100, 150 and 200 occupants as the design parameter. The implementation of AENS has enabled the identification, acceleration and minimization of the queuing bottleneck. Moreover, it has proven that the evacuation time for the design parameters has been reduced by 19.9%, 23%, and 32.6% respectively