5.2.5. Performance Comparison

Li et al. extended their approach suitable for the single-exit evacuation to the multi-exit evacuation in [26]. Here, our algorithm is compared with that in [26] based on a testing network model consisting of 923 nodes and 1779 edges. Three of these nodes are exits. When the group size is uniform, the test results are shown in Table 6, where *Ng* and *Ne* are the number of groups and the number of evacuees passing through each exit and *Te* is the evacuation time at each exit. Figure 18 shows the change of the total evacuation time and the operation time of each algorithm when the group size increases gradually.


**Table 6.** The test results when the group size is uniform.

**Figure 18.** The comparative results when the group size is uniform. (**a**) The change of the total evacuation time with the increasement of the number of groups; (**b**) The change of the operation time with the increasement of the number of groups.

To make the test more realistic, we let the group size go to random numbers. When the group size is random, the test results are shown in Table 7, where the value of the group size is a range, which means that the group size can take any value within this range randomly. Figure 19 shows the change of total evacuation time and the operation time of each algorithm when the group size increases gradually.

**Figure 19.** The comparative results when the group size is random. (**a**) The change of the total evacuation time with the increasement of the number of groups; (**b**) The change of the operation time with the increasement of the number of groups.

As shown in Tables 6 and 7 and Figures 18 and 19, our algorithm and that of [26] are very close in the overall evacuation time, but the planning efficiency of our algorithm is much higher than that of [26]. For applications that require rapid or real-time evacuation planning, our algorithm has obvious advantages.


**Table 7.** The test results when the group size is random.
