Transportation and HVAC Systems for Building Emergency Evacuation.
Journal
2006 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, Shanghai, China, 7-10 October 2006
Pages
363-368
Date Issued
2006
Author(s)
Abstract
Building emergency evacuation has long been recognized as an important problem, since safety is a major concern for building occupants. The paths selected for egress should be pressurized with fresh air through HVAC airflow control. The problem is to minimize the egress time by reconfiguring HVAC units and selecting egress paths for occupants in a building, subject to path capacities and HVAC system limitations. The interdependency of the transportation and HVAC systems and the combinatorial nature of discrete optimization make this a challenging problem. For simplicity, steady-state airflow analysis over each duct is used, and dampers are considered either fully open or fully closed. Our key idea is to make full use of traditional network flow models for egress while considering the fan power capacity as a constraint. The problem is solved by iteratively using a maxflow algorithm while exploiting dominance properties to reduce the search space. An optimized reconfiguration of the HVAC is established, resulting in significant improvements in evacuation time. © 2006 IEEE.
Subjects
Building transportation systems; Egress; Emergency evacuation; HVAC
SDGs
Other Subjects
Aerospace applications; Automation; Buildings; Computer networks; Electric fault location; Industrial engineering; Integer programming; Iterative methods; Mathematical models; Mechanization; Metropolitan area networks; Network protocols; Optimization; Product design; Robotics; Technology; (PL) properties; air flow analysis; air flow control; Automation science; Challenging problem; Discrete optimization; egress time; Emergency evacuations; Evacuation time; Fan power; Fresh air; Heating , ventilating and airconditioning (HVAC) systems; HVAC systems; international conferences; Max Flow algorithm; network flow models; Search spaces; Air conditioning
Type
conference paper