Joint Optimization for Pedestrian, Information and Energy Flows in Emergency Response Systems With Energy Harvesting and Energy Sharing

The rapid progress in informatisation and electrification in transportation has gradually transferred public transport junctions such as metro stations into the nexus of pedestrian flows, information flows, computation flows and energy flows. These smart environments that are efficient in handling large volume passenger flows in routine circumstances can become even more vulnerable during emergency situations and amplify the losses in lives and property owing to power outage triggered service degradation and destructive crowed behaviours. On the bright side, the increasingly abundant resources contained in smart environments have enlarged the optimisation space of an evacuation process, yet little research has concentrated on the joint optimal resource allocation between transportation infrastructures and pedestrians. Hence, in the paper, we propose a queueing network based resource allocation model to comprehensively optimise various types of resources during emergency evacuations. Experiments are conducted in a simulated metro station environment with realistic settings. The simulation results show that the proposed model can considerably improve the evacuation efficiency as well as the robustness of the emergency response system during emergency situations.