Visual Analytics for Dynamic Evacuation Planning

Abstract

We use visual analytics to assist human experts in the verification of evacuation schedules and enable them to identify the bottle-necks in building evacuation. The user can change parameters, such as the number of occupants present in the rooms, the parametric settings for fire simulation, the building design, etc. and analyze their effect on evacuation. Visualization of the people flow in the building combined with the computational techniques plays a great role in analyzing the evacuation process. This helps in understanding the movement of the people during evacuation, possible delays in evacuation process, etc. and it provides feedback to the user. We introduce a novel priority based distributed evacuation routing (PDER) algorithm that produces dynamic evacuation schedules and is designed to work smoothly and seamlessly in interactive exploratory environments for visual analysis of dynamically updated evacuation schedules.