Optimal building evacuation time considering evacuation routes

The main purpose of this work is to present a formulation of the building evacuation problem that incorporates evacuation routes and applies the functions developed by Nelson and McLennan [H.E. Nelson, H.A. McLennan (Eds.), Emergency Movement, The SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering, 1996, pp. 3.286-3.295 (Section 3/Chapter 14)] to model the movement of people. These considerations lead to significant changes in the form of the evacuation and inverse evacuation functions, so it is necessary to develop a new procedure for solving the building evacuation problem. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.