Finding the earliest arrival path through a time-varying network for evacuation planning of mine water inrush

Evacuation planning that navigates evacuees to escape significantly improves the safety of the miners at the mine water inrush conditions. However, conventional methods do not consider the effect of the water flow on the transit time when determining escape paths for evacuees. In the present study, a novel method is proposed to find the earliest arrival path through a time-varying network for the evacuation planning of the mine water inrush. Firstly, the effect of the water flow on the transit time is formulated in the objective function based on the spatiotemporal results of the numerical simulation. Secondly, the time-varying network and the earliest arrival path are defined accordingly, where the edge weight of the network representing the transit time of the corresponding roadway varies over time. Moreover, the earliest arrival path is a path with the minimum arrival time of the destination for each source with a starting time, in which waiting is allowed to trade off a wait for traversing a roadway in less time. Thirdly, since the conventional shortest path methods have limitations on searching shortest paths through a time-varying network, the time-varying earliest arrival path (TVEAP) algorithm is proposed for the improvement. In order to evaluate the validity and feasibility of the proposed algorithm, mathematical proof and experiments are carried out. The results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively find the earliest arrival path to the destination following the evacuation strategy. Moreover, it is found that the corresponding time efficiency meets the real-time requirement of the evacuation planning with the capability of 250 evacuees on a quad-core desktop.