Risk-awareness in multi-level building evacuation with smoke: Burj Khalifa case study

We study a risk-aware multi-level evacuation control problem considering smoke propagation. We propose a continuous-time Markov-chain-based modeling for both population motion and smoke propagation while considering spatial/physical constraints such as walls and/or obstacles. Besides, we formally present some properties of the evacuation model. To do so, we design, in a semi explicit way, a mean-field-risk-aware control that reduces the evacuation time while avoiding the crowd and smoke. Finally, we present numerical examples for evacuation of single-level and multi-level buildings. The multi-level building is Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world with 164 floors. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.