Formal aspects of egress complexity
Egress complexity is concerned with the summative uncertainty experienced by a naive occupant of a building when faced with a challenge to evacuate without the assistance of signage. This paper takes the present model of egress complexity and recasts its basic initiative in terms of elementary order theory. Arguments are presented to demonstrate the existence of distinct maximum and minimum exit complexities for a given number of compartments, the monotonic nature of complexity and the relationship of a given floorplan complexity to the corresponding measures of its homomorphic images. The uniqueness of the theory on which the model is developed sterns from a scenario-independent nonmetric approach to egress measurement. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
egress complexity fire safety tree network shannon entropy