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Main Authors: Lavalle-Rivera, Joseph, Ramesh, Aniirudh, Chakraborty, Subhadeep
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07830
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author Lavalle-Rivera, Joseph
Ramesh, Aniirudh
Chakraborty, Subhadeep
author_facet Lavalle-Rivera, Joseph
Ramesh, Aniirudh
Chakraborty, Subhadeep
contents A total of more than 3400 public shootings have occurred in the United States between 2016 and 2022. Among these, 25.1% of them took place in an educational institution, 29.4% at the workplace including office buildings, 19.6% in retail store locations, and 13.4% in restaurants and bars. During these critical scenarios, making the right decisions while evacuating can make the difference between life and death. However, emergency evacuation is intensely stressful, which along with the lack of verifiable real-time information may lead to fatal incorrect decisions. To tackle this problem, we developed a multi-route routing optimization algorithm that determines multiple optimal safe routes for each evacuee while accounting for available capacity along the route, thus reducing the threat of crowding and bottlenecking. Overall, our algorithm reduces the total casualties by 34.16% and 53.3%, compared to our previous routing algorithm without capacity constraints and an expert-advised routing strategy respectively. Further, our approach to reduce crowding resulted in an approximate 50% reduction in occupancy in key bottlenecking nodes compared to both of the other evacuation algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_07830
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Optimized Evacuation Plan for an Active-Shooter Situation Constrained by Network Capacity
Lavalle-Rivera, Joseph
Ramesh, Aniirudh
Chakraborty, Subhadeep
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
A total of more than 3400 public shootings have occurred in the United States between 2016 and 2022. Among these, 25.1% of them took place in an educational institution, 29.4% at the workplace including office buildings, 19.6% in retail store locations, and 13.4% in restaurants and bars. During these critical scenarios, making the right decisions while evacuating can make the difference between life and death. However, emergency evacuation is intensely stressful, which along with the lack of verifiable real-time information may lead to fatal incorrect decisions. To tackle this problem, we developed a multi-route routing optimization algorithm that determines multiple optimal safe routes for each evacuee while accounting for available capacity along the route, thus reducing the threat of crowding and bottlenecking. Overall, our algorithm reduces the total casualties by 34.16% and 53.3%, compared to our previous routing algorithm without capacity constraints and an expert-advised routing strategy respectively. Further, our approach to reduce crowding resulted in an approximate 50% reduction in occupancy in key bottlenecking nodes compared to both of the other evacuation algorithms.
title An Optimized Evacuation Plan for an Active-Shooter Situation Constrained by Network Capacity
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07830