Emergency Evacuation Prediction from Access-Control Movement Data
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional emergency evacuation planning and training methods lack realism and fail to incorporate critical access control data, leading to inefficient evacuation routes and increased evacuation times, potentially endangering lives.
Innovation Solution
A system that utilizes access control data to model occupant behavior and generate predefined evacuation routes, predicting evacuation times based on historical movement patterns, and adjusts these routes through feedback from evacuation drills to enhance accuracy.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If frequent fire drills are conducted, then safety training effectiveness is improved, but employee work routines are disrupted and confidence erodes
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates virtual copies of evacuation scenarios using access control data to simulate realistic occupant behavior patterns. Instead of physical drills, the system generates digital twins of evacuation situations that can be analyzed without disrupting actual facility operations, maintaining safety training effectiveness while eliminating work disruption
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the mechanical system of physical fire drills with an information-based system that uses access control data analytics. The mechanical disruption of drills is substituted by computational modeling that predicts evacuation times and optimizes routes without requiring actual employee participation in disruptive exercises
2Ease of manufacture
If traditional static evacuation plans are used, then planning simplicity is maintained, but evacuation routes are inefficient and evacuation times increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system transforms static evacuation plans into dynamic, adaptive routes by continuously analyzing access control data to understand actual occupant movement patterns. Evacuation routes are no longer fixed but adapt based on historical behavior data, real-time facility occupancy, and predicted flow patterns, significantly reducing evacuation times while maintaining planning manageability through automated algorithms
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the parameters of evacuation planning from fixed, predetermined routes to flexible, data-driven pathways. By incorporating variables such as historical movement patterns, time of day, day of week, and facility-specific behavior characteristics, the system optimizes evacuation parameters dynamically without requiring complex manual planning for each scenario
3Productivity
If evacuation routes are optimized based on historical behavior data, then evacuation efficiency is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system achieves optimized evacuation efficiency by making the access control system multi-functional. The same access control infrastructure that tracks employee badge swipes for security purposes is also utilized to collect movement data for evacuation optimization. This universal use of existing data sources improves evacuation efficiency without requiring separate complex data collection systems
Solution Approach 2:
The evacuation optimization system serves itself by automatically analyzing access control data that is already being collected for security purposes. The system self-configures evacuation routes based on historical patterns without requiring manual intervention for each optimization cycle, reducing the operational complexity despite the sophisticated algorithms involved
Data Source
AI summary
Emergency evacuation times may be predicted for a facility. Location information may be captured for each of a plurality of people within the facility and one or more historical movement patterns of one or more of the plurality of people associated with the facility may be identified based at least in part on the captured location information. One or more predefined evacuation routes may be identified for the facility. The emergency evacuation time for evacuating the facility using the one or more predefined evacuation routes in response to an evacuation event may be predicted based at least in part on the one or more historical movement patterns of one or more of the plurality of people associated with the facility.