Building evacuation time optimization using constraint-based design approach

The number of large public buildings is growing rapidly in function and complexity, which cause the evacuation path in case of fire to be too long and complex increasing the evacuation time. In this paper, a constraint-based design approach is introduced to automatically generate the optimal position of the building evacuation door to minimize the length of the escape route, thus reducing the evacuation time. The position of the evacuation doors is ruled by design specifications and building structures, in this study, a constraint-based model which includes space constraints and design constraints is proposed to generate the optimal door positions which minimize evacuation distance. The optimal combinations of the evacuation doors positions are obtained with the branch and bound algorithm in the model. Compared with the existing work, this approach avoids repeated modification of the design drawings and has significantly reduced the evacuation time by automatically generating optimal door positions. In this paper, two different size case studies from two museums are analyzed to explain the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that the evacuation door layout generated by our approach outperforms the original layout.