Earliest Arrival Flow with Time Dependent Capacity Approach to the Evacuation Problems

Abstract: Evacuation problems can be modeled as flow problems in dynamic networks. A dynamic network is defined by a directed graph G = (N,A) with sources, sinks and non-negative integral travel times and capacities for every arc (i,j) e A. The earliest arrival flow problem is to send a maximum amount of dynamic flow reaching the sink not only for the given time horizon T, but also for any time T' < T . This problem mimics the evacuation problem of public buildings where occupancies may not known. For the buildings where the number of occupancies is known and concentrated only in one source, the quickest flow model is used to find the minimum egress time. We propose in this paper a solution procedure for evacuation problems with a single source of the building where the occupancy number is either known or unknown. The possibility that the flow capacity may change due to the increasing of smoke density or fire obstructions can be mirrored in our model. The solution procedure looks iteratively for the shortest conditional augmenting path (SCAP) from source to sink and compute the time intervals in which flow reaches the sink via this path