Evacuation plan

About evacuation plans

An evacuation plan is the posted life-safety diagram that tells a person where they are, which routes lead to final exits, and where to find alarms, firefighting equipment, first aid, and the assembly point. Schematex builds it on measurable floorplan geometry and checks rules that a drawing tool cannot see: missing location markers, broken route hops, non-independent exits, print scale, safety-sign size, and the mandatory legend.

The engine supports three selectable regimes: ISO 23601 / ISO 7010 / ISO 3864, NFPA 170 Chapter 11 with NFPA 101, and UAE Civil Defence bilingual plans. The output is an editable SVG aid for competent review; it does not replace approval by the authority having jurisdiction.

1. Start with the posted location

Change the header to evacuation (alias escapeplan), declare the target sheet, and add exactly one here marker for the location where this copy will be mounted:

evacuation "Floor 2 — Escape Plan" unit m
compliance iso
sheet a3 landscape
room office "Office" at 0,0 size 6x5
here in office at 3,2.5
exit-final x1 in office at 6,2.5 side east "EXIT"
route primary here -> x1

One building may need many posted copies. Keep the geometry and routes identical and render one copy per mounting point, changing only the here line.

2. Safety signs

Signs use a fixed 24×24 drawing grid and a fixed printed size (8 mm by default), independent of the floor-plan scale. Safe-condition signs have a solid green plate, firefighting signs a solid red plate, and their pictograms are white knockout shapes. Schematex draws original geometry; it does not embed or trace ISO or NFPA artwork.

The coordinate-based vocabulary is:

• Exits and rescue: exit, exit-final, assembly, refuge, shelter, escape-ladder, rescue-window, emergency-door-push, emergency-door-slide
• Medical and emergency help: first-aid, aed, stretcher, doctor, eyewash, safety-shower, emergency-phone, break-glass
• Fire equipment: extinguisher, hose-reel, fire-ladder, fire-equipment, call-point, fire-phone, riser
• Plan and prohibition: here, not-an-exit, no-elevator, alarm-sounder
• Door overlays: fire-door and smoke-door attach to an existing door rather than a coordinate

Use either the short form or explicit safety:

extinguisher ext1 in corridor at 1.2,0.3 side north class "ABC"
safety first-aid aid1 in lobby at 4.8,1.8
assembly muster outside at 14,10 "Assembly Point A"
fire-door between corridor stairA rating "EI30"

Room coordinates are relative to that room. outside at x,y is plan-absolute. side north|south|east|west snaps a sign onto the wall; hand left|right overrides the automatically selected directional variant.

3. Escape routes

A route is an authored sequence, not an inferred path:

route primary here -> corridor -> stairB -> exitB
route secondary here -> corridor -> lobby -> stairA -> exitA
route accessible here -> corridor -> refugeA
route rescue fireEntry -> serviceCorridor -> riserRoom

Every hop between different rooms must cross a declared door or opening. Name intermediate rooms explicitly. Schematex draws deterministic orthogonal segments through each opening, rounds the bends, and places chevrons every 2 m pointing away from here. secondary is dashed, accessible carries a wheelchair marker, and rescue is blue.

Routes must end at exit, exit-final, or assembly. Two routes are independent only when they end at different final exits and their room sequences differ structurally.

4. Compliance profiles

Select the profile near the top:

compliance nfpa

Profile selection changes glyph variants and validation, never room geometry.

5. Print scale and sheet size

Declare sheet a4|a3|a2|letter|tabloid with landscape or portrait. Schematex subtracts a 15 mm margin, fits the largest floor plate to both printable axes, and rounds up to a conventional denominator (1:50, 1:100, 1:200, 1:250, and so on).

Safety signs remain 8 mm on paper. The scale converts that fixed paper size back into a temporary plan-space footprint for collision checking; signs do not shrink with the building. ISO and UAE plans coarser than 1:250 are errors.

Every rendered sheet carries a note such as:

Scale 1:200 on A3 (landscape) · symbols 8.0 mm · ISO 23601 ✓

6. Layers and multi-floor plans

Evacuation mode keeps rooms, walls, openings, door swings, stairs, elevators, columns, room names, north, routes, safety signs, the legend, and scale note. It automatically hides ordinary furniture, area text, and dimension lines. Add show furniture only when a specific item is necessary for orientation.

Multi-floor syntax is inherited from floorplan:

evacuation "Building Escape Plans" unit m stack horizontal
floor 0 "Ground Floor"
room lobby at 0,0 size 8x5
furniture stairs S1 in lobby at 0.4,0.4

floor 1 "First Floor"
room landing at 0,0 size 8x5
furniture stairs S1 in landing at 0.4,0.4

All plates share one scale. Reusing S1 registers one stairwell: the lower occurrence is labeled UP, upper occurrences DN, and a coordinate offset greater than 0.1 m warns. Each floor is still validated as its own posted sheet.

7. Mandatory legend

The legend is Tier M: it is always present and lists every encoding used, grouped as Escape routes, Exits, Fire equipment, First aid, and Structural. ISO profiles include the sign identity code in labels; NFPA omits ISO codes.

You may rename labels or sections with the shared legend directives, but legend: off is a parse error because ISO 23601 and NFPA 170 require the legend.

8. Validation messages

The engine checks all of these before publication:

1. Every floor has a here marker.
2. Every floor has an exit.
3. Route hops cross a declared opening.
4. Two escape routes are structurally independent (NFPA error; ISO/UAE warning).
5. Connected rooms are represented on a route or have an exit.
6. Routes terminate at an exit or assembly point.
7. Fixed-size safety signs remain legible and do not overlap.
8. UAE labels contain non-empty English and Arabic halves separated by /.
9. NFPA/UAE plans with elevators receive one no-elevator marker automatically.
10. The legend cannot be disabled.
11. monochrome reports an error and still renders in semantic safety colors for diagnosis.
12. ISO/UAE printed scale is no coarser than 1:250.
13. Unknown sign kinds list valid names and suggest the closest match.

Each diagnostic names the governing source so the author knows whether the fix comes from ISO 23601, NFPA 170/NFPA 101, or UAE Civil Defence guidance.

9. Grammar

plan       ::= ("evacuation"|"escapeplan") string? ("unit" ("m"|"ft"))? statement*
statement  ::= floorplan-statement | compliance | sheet | safety | route | rated-door | legend
compliance ::= "compliance" ("iso"|"nfpa"|"uae")
sheet      ::= "sheet" ("a4"|"a3"|"a2"|"letter"|"tabloid") ("landscape"|"portrait")?
safety     ::= "safety"? kind id? ("in" room "at" coord | "outside" "at" coord)
               ("side" wallside)? ("hand" ("left"|"right"))? ("rotate" num)?
               ("class" string)? string?
route      ::= "route" ("primary"|"secondary"|"accessible"|"rescue")?
               anchor ("->" anchor)+ string?
rated-door ::= ("fire-door"|"smoke-door")
               ("between" room room | room wallside ("at" pct)?) ("rating" string)?

Related examples

• Office floor with two escape routes
• US warehouse using NFPA
• English/Arabic clinic plan