A novel three-value grid scheme and rescue path planning algorithm for building fire

Abstract

The 0-1 grid method is commonly used to divide a fire building into fully passable and fully impassable areas. Firefighters are only able to perform rescue tasks in the fully passable areas. However, in an actual building fire environment, there are three types of areas: fully impassable areas (areas blocked by obstacles or with heavy smoke and fire), fully passable areas, and partially passable areas (areas without obstacles or fire, but with some smoke risk). Due to the urgency of rescue, firefighters can consider conducting rescue tasks in both fully passable and partially passable areas to save valuable rescue time. To address this issue, we propose a three-value grid method, which classifies the fire environment into fully impassable areas, fully passable areas, and partially passable areas, represented by 1, 0, and 0.5, respectively. Considering that the ACO algorithm is prone to local optimum, we propose an enhanced ant colony algorithm (EACO) to solve the fire rescue path planning problem. The EACO introduces an adaptive heuristic function, a new pheromone increment strategy, and a pheromone segmentation rule to predict the shortest rescue path in the fire environment. Moreover, the EACO takes into account both the path length and the risk to balance rescue effectiveness and safety. Experiments show that the EACO obtains the shortest rescue path, which demonstrates its strong path planning capability. The three-value grid method and the path planning algorithm take reasonable application requirements into account.