  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.
