Crowd Evacuation for Indoor Public Spaces Using Coulomb’s Law.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Artificial Intelligence Volume 2012, Article ID 340615, 16 pages doi:10.1155/2012/340615 Research Article Crowd Evacuation for Indoor Public Spaces Using Coulomb’s Law Pejman Kamkarian1 and Henry Hexmoor2 1 Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA 2 Department of Computer Science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Pejman Kamkarian, pejman@ Received 26 March 2012; Revised 11 June 2012; Accepted 2 July 2012 Academic Editor: Thomas Mandl Copyright © 2012 P. Kamkarian and H. Hexmoor. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This paper focuses on designing a tool for guiding a group of people out of a public building when they are faced with dangerous situations that require immediate evacuation. Despite architectural attempts to produce safe floor plans and exit door placements, people will still commit to fatal route decisions. Since they have access to global views, we believe supervisory people in the control room can use our simulation tools to determine the best courses of action for people. Accordingly, supervisors can guide people to safety. In this paper, we combine Coulomb’s electrical law, graph theory, and convex and centroid concepts to demonstrate a computer-generated evacuation scenario that divides the environment into different safe boundaries around the locations of each exit door in order to guide people through exit doors safely and in the most expedient time frame. Our mechanism