The EvoStar 2024 conference took place in the picturesque coastal town of Aberystwyth (Wales, UK) from April 3rd to April 5th, in the Conference Suit of Aberystwyth University. Held under the auspices of the SPECIES society and locally organized by Christine Zarges, the conference gathered the usual mixture of young and experienced researchers from all over the world, once again providing a great atmosphere and the perfect relaxed and welcoming environment that conference regulars know so well.
The Bio4Res project made their presence felt at the conference with the presentation of the paper entitled «Evolutionary Algorithms for Optimizing Emergency Exit Placement in Indoor Environments» by C. Cotta and J.E. Gallardo, whose abstract follows:
The problem of finding the optimal placement of emergency exits in an indoor environment to facilitate the rapid and orderly evacuation of crowds is addressed in this work. A cellular-automaton model is used to simulate the behavior of pedestrians in such scenarios, taking into account factors such as the environment, the pedestrians themselves, and the interactions among them. A metric is proposed to determine how successful or satisfactory an evacuation was. Subsequently, two metaheuristic algorithms, namely an iterated greedy heuristic and an evolutionary algorithm (EA) are proposed to solve the optimization problem. A comparative analysis shows that the proposed EA is able to find effective solutions for different scenarios, and that an island-based version of it outperforms the other two algorithms in terms of solution quality.
Carlos Cotta, José E. Gallardo, Evolutionary Algorithms for Optimizing Emergency Exit Placement in Indoor Environments, Applications of Evolutionary Computing – 27th International Conference, EvoApplications 2024, Smith, Stephen; Correia, João; Cintrano, Christian (Ed.), pp. 194-208, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2024.
Following the commitment of the Bio4Res project with open science, both the data instances and the source code used in the experimentation have been released. An interesting discussion ensued after the presentation. Kudos to the attendees and indeed to the local organizers for making once again the EvoStar conference live up to its high standards!