Exit location can influence evacuation efficiency without changing the number of exits, yet its mechanism lacks quantitative characterization. Using a complex single-floor hospital outpatient department floor plan with 186 occupants as the case study, based on a direction-aware cellular automaton (CA) model, this study constructed two exit layout scenarios within the same complex building floor plan and independently repeated 50 simulations for each scenario under identical occupant population and model parameters. A mechanism-oriented analysis was conducted from the perspectives of evacuation efficiency, structural fairness, behavioral fairness, and structure–behavior deviation. The results showed that, in this case, exit relocation shortened the total evacuation time by approximately 20% (p<0.001) and significantly reduced the concentration of exit utilization, whereas the service area distribution changed only slightly, and local peak density did not increase significantly. This indicates that exit location improves evacuation efficiency by restructuring the crowd-splitting structure rather than by a simple balancing of structural service coverage. This study provides quantitative evidence for performance-based evacuation design and sustainable safety optimization in complex spaces.
Xu et al. (2026) studied this question.