Safety planning for crowd evacuation is an important and active research topic nowadays. One important issue is to devise the evacuation plans of individuals in emergency situations so as to reduce the total evacuation time. This paper proposes a novel evolutionary algorithm (EA)-based methodology, together with agent-based crowd simulation, to solve the evacuation planning problem. The proposed method features a novel segmentation strategy which divides the entire evacuation region into

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... ions based on a discriminant function. Each sub-region is assigned with an exit gate, and individuals in a sub-region will run toward the corresponding exit gate for evacuation. In this way, the evacuation planning problem is converted to a symbolic regression problem. Then an evolutionary algorithm, using agent-based crowd simulation as fitness function, is developed to search for the global optimal solution. The simulation results on different scenarios demonstrate that the proposed method is effective to reduce the evacuation time. 395 978-1-4799-7486-3/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE Zhong, Luo, Cai, and Lees