Indoor fire emergency evacuation path planning based on improved NavMesh algorithm

Abstract

With the acceleration of urbanization, the frequency of building fire incidents has been increasing year by year. Therefore, rapid, efficient, and safe evacuation from buildings has become an urgent and important task. A construction fire escape path planning method based on an improved NavMesh algorithm is proposed in this paper. Firstly, by using the method of local updates in the navigation grid, redundant computation is reduced, and the update time of the improved algorithm is about 6.8% of that of the original algorithm, immediate generation of navigation is achieved. Secondly, the heuristic function of the pathfinding algorithm is improved, and a multi-exit path planning mechanism is proposed to achieve more efficient, which can quickly plan a safe evacuation path away from the spreading fire and smoke in the event of a fire. Finally, a new evaluation index called Navigation Grid Complexity (NGC) is proposed and demonstrated to measure the quality of navigation grids. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are validated through simulation experiments on actual building models, which can provide real-time, efficient, intelligent, and safe path planning for rapid evacuation of evacuees in the fire scene.