An Optimized Evacuation Plan for an Active-Shooter Situation Constrained by Network Capacity
This addresses a critical safety issue for people in public spaces like schools, workplaces, and retail stores during emergencies, offering a domain-specific incremental improvement over existing evacuation strategies.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing evacuation routes during active-shooter situations by developing a multi-route routing algorithm that accounts for network capacity to reduce crowding and bottlenecks, resulting in a 34.16% to 53.3% reduction in total casualties and a 50% reduction in occupancy at key bottleneck nodes compared to other methods.
A total of more than 3400 public shootings have occurred in the United States between 2016 and 2022. Among these, 25.1% of them took place in an educational institution, 29.4% at the workplace including office buildings, 19.6% in retail store locations, and 13.4% in restaurants and bars. During these critical scenarios, making the right decisions while evacuating can make the difference between life and death. However, emergency evacuation is intensely stressful, which along with the lack of verifiable real-time information may lead to fatal incorrect decisions. To tackle this problem, we developed a multi-route routing optimization algorithm that determines multiple optimal safe routes for each evacuee while accounting for available capacity along the route, thus reducing the threat of crowding and bottlenecking. Overall, our algorithm reduces the total casualties by 34.16% and 53.3%, compared to our previous routing algorithm without capacity constraints and an expert-advised routing strategy respectively. Further, our approach to reduce crowding resulted in an approximate 50% reduction in occupancy in key bottlenecking nodes compared to both of the other evacuation algorithms.