Abstract:

To address the low efficiency and safety of personnel evacuation in fire scenarios amid China's accelerating urbanisation and the increasing number of densely populated venues, a single-story building fire evacuation model based on the A^* algorithm was developed. A grid-based model was introduced and combined with the PSO algorithm to comprehensively account for multiple complex factors influencing the evacuation process, including smoke concentration, high-temperature environments, hazardous gas dispersion, and personnel density. Based on the single-story building fire evacuation model, multivariate functional relationships were used to quantify the influence coefficients of various factors on personnel movement velocity, thereby achieving a precise description of the evacuation process. During numerical simulation experiments, the performance of the original and improved A^* algorithms was compared across scenarios with varying occupant numbers within the building. The results indicate that compared to the traditional A^* algorithm, the improved model reduces evacuation time by 20.9% and path length by 3.27%. It can effectively prevent evacuation paths from falling into local optima and avoid occupants entering dead ends.

Key words: evacuation of occupants, evacuation path, particle swarm optimisation(PSO)algorithm, improved A^* algorithm, path planning