A Game-Theoretic Approach to Safe Crowd Evacuation in Emergencies

Obstacle removal in crowd evacuation is critical to safety and the evacuation system efficiency. Recently, manyresearchers proposed game theoreticmodels to avoid and remove obstacles for crowd evacuation. Game theoreticalmodels aim to study and analyze the strategic behaviors of individuals within a crowd and their interactionsduring the evacuation. Game theoretical models have some limitations in the context of crowd evacuation. Thesemodels consider a group of individuals as homogeneous objects with the same goals, involve complex mathematicalformulation, and cannot model real-world scenarios such as panic, environmental information, crowds that movedynamically, etc. The proposed work presents a game theoretic model integrating an agent-based model to removethe obstacles from exits. The proposed model considered the parameters named: (1) obstacle size, length, andwidth, (2) removal time, (3) evacuation time, (4) crowd density, (5) obstacle identification, and (6) route selection.The proposed work conducts various experiments considering different conditions, such as obstacle types, obstacleremoval, and several obstacles. Evaluation results show the proposed model’s effectiveness compared with existingliterature in reducing the overall evacuation time, cell selection, and obstacle removal. The study is potentially usefulfor public safety situations such as emergency evacuations during disasters and calamities.

Model considering panic emotion and personality traits for crowd evacuation

Panic is a common emotion when pedestrians are in danger during the actual evacuation, which can affect pedestrians a lot and may lead to fatalities as people are crushed or trampled. However, the systematic studies and quantitative analysis of evacuation panic, such as panic behaviors, panic evolution, and the stress responses of pedestrians with different personality traits to panic emotion are still rare. Here, combined with the theories of OCEAN(openness, conscientiousness,extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) model and SIS(susceptible, infected, susceptible) model, an extended cellular automata model is established by the floor field method in order to investigate the dynamics of panic emotion in the crowd and dynamics of pedestrians affected by emotion. In the model, pedestrians are divided into stable pedestrians and sensitive pedestrians according to their different personality traits in response to emotion, and their emotional state can be normal or panic. Besides, emotion contagion, emotion decay, and the influence of emotion on pedestrian movement decision-making are also considered. The simulation results show that evacuation efficiency will be reduced, for panic pedestrians may act maladaptive behaviors, thereby making the crowd more chaotic. The results further suggest that improving pedestrian psychological ability and raising the standard of management can effectively increase evacuation efficiency. And it is necessary to reduce the panic level of group as soon as possible at the beginning of evacuation. We hope this research could provide a new method to analyze crowd evacuation in panic situations.

Discrete element crowd model for pedestrian evacuation through an exit

A series of accidents caused by crowds within the last decades evoked a lot of scientific interest in modeling the movement of pedestrian crowds. Based on the discrete element method, a granular dynamic model, in which the human body is simplified as a self-driven sphere, is proposed to simulate the characteristics of crowd flow through an exit. In this model, the repulsive force among people is considered to have an anisotropic feature, and the physical contact force due to body deformation is quantified by the Hertz contact model. The movement of the human body is simulated by applying the second Newton＇s law. The crowd flow through an exit at different desired velocities is studied and simulation results indicated that crowd flow exhibits three distinct states, i.e., smooth state, transition state and phase separation state. In the simulation, the clogging phenomenon occurs more easily when the desired velocity is high and the exit may as a result be totally blocked at a desired velocity of 1.6 m/s or above, leading to faster-to-frozen effect.

Technology for Simulating Crowd Evacuation Behaviors

This paper presents a model for simulating crowd evacuation and investigates three widely recognized problems. For the space continuity problem, this paper presents two computation algorithms： one uses grid space to evaluate the coordinates of the obstacle＇s bounding box and the other employs the geometry rule to establish individual evacuation routes. For the problem of collision, avoidance, and excess among the individuals, this paper computes the generalized force and friction force and then modifies the direction of march to obtain a speed model based on the crowd density and real time speed. For the exit selection problem, this paper establishes a method of selecting the exits by combining the exit＇s crowd state with the individuals. Finally, a particle system is used to simulate the behavior of crowd evacuation and produces useful test results.

Evacuation Vector Field in Crowd Dynamics

The geometrical effect is one of the most important factors in the kinetic modeling of crowd evacuation, besides the interaction between agents. More precisely, in the process of crowd evacuation, agents have the desire to reach the exit, and the ability to avoid the walls or obstacles. In this study, we propose the evacuation vector field which incorporates the geometrical effects in crowd evacuation. This is useful for modeling the crowd evacuation from complex venue.

Spatial memory enhances the evacuation efficiency of virtual pedestrians under poor visibility condition

Spatial memory is a critical navigation support tool for disoriented evacuees during evacuation under adverse environ-mental conditions such as dark or smoky conditions. Owing to the complexity of memory, it is challenging to understand the effect of spatial memory on pedestrian evacuation quantitatively. In this study, we propose a simple method to quan- titatively represent the evacuee＇s spatial memory about the emergency exit, model the evacuation of pedestrians under the guidance of the spatial memory, and investigate the effect of the evacuee＇s spatial memory on the evacuation from theoretical and physical perspectives. The result shows that （i） a good memory can significantly assist the evacuation of pedestrians under poor visibility conditions, and the evacuation can always succeed when the degree of the memory exceeds a threshold （φ〉 0.5）; （ii） the effect of memory is superior to that of ＂follow-the-crowd＂ under the same environmental conditions; （iii） in the case of multiple exits, the difference in the degree of the memory between evacuees has a significant effect （the greater the difference, the faster the evacuation） for the evacuation under poor visibility conditions. Our study provides a new quantitative insight into the effect of spatial memory on crowd evacuation under poor visibility conditions.

An improved social force model (ISFM)-based crowd evacuation simulation method in virtual reality with a subway fire as a case study

Crowd evacuation simulation using virtual reality(VR)is significant for digital emergency response construction.However,existing evacuation simulation studies suffer from poor adaptation to complex environments,inefficient evacuations,and poor simulation effects and do not fully consider the impacts of specific disaster environments on crowd evacuation.To more realistically express the crowd evacuation results obtained under the influence offire environments and the subjective consciousness of pedestrians in subway stations,we designed a dynamic pedestrian evacuation path planning method under multiple constraints,analysed the influences of an‘environmental role’and a‘subjective initiative’on crowd evacuation,established an improved social force model(ISFM)-based crowd evacuation simulation method in VR,developed a prototype system and conducted experimental analyses.The experimental results show that the crowd evacuation time of the ISFM is affected by the disaster severity.In simulation experiments without disaster scenarios,the improved model’s crowd evacuation efficiency improved by averages of 12.53%and 15.37%over the commercial Pathfinder software and the original social force model,respectively.The method described herein can effectively support real-time VR crowd evacuation simulation under multiexit and multifloor conditions and can provide technical support for emergency evacuation learning and management decision analyses involving subwayfires.

Deep reinforcement learning and 3D physical environments applied to crowd evacuation in congested scenarios

To avoid crowd evacuation simulations depending on 2D environments and real data,we propose a framework for crowd evacuation modeling and simulation by applying deep reinforcement learning(DRL)and 3D physical environments(3DPEs).In 3DPEs,we construct simulation scenarios from the aspects of geometry,semantics and physics,which include the environment,the agents and their interactions,and provide training samples for DRL.In DRL,we design a double branch feature extraction combined actor and critic network as the DRL policy and value function and use a clipped surrogate objective with polynomial decay to update the policy.With a unified configuration,we conduct evacuation simulations.In scenarios with one exit,we reproduce and verify the bottleneck effect of congested crowds and explore the impact of exit width and agent characteristics(number,mass and height)on evacuation.In scenarios with two exits and a uniform(nonuniform)distribution of agents,we explore the impact of exit characteristics(width and relative position)and agent characteristics(height,initial location and distribution)on agent exit selection and evacuation.Overall,interactive 3DPEs and unified DRL enable agents to adapt to different evacuation scenarios to simulate crowd evacuation and explore the laws of crowd evacuation.

A review of behavior mechanisms and crowd evacuation animation in emergency exercises

Emergency exercises are an efficient approach for preventing serious damage and harm, including loss of life and property and a wide range of adverse social effects, during various public emergencies. Among various factors affecting the value of emergency exercises, including their design, development, conduct, evaluation, and improvement planning, this paper emphasizes the focal role of evacuees and their behavior. We address two concerns: What are the intrinsic reasons behind human behavior? How do we model and exhibit human behavior? We review studies investigating the mechanisms of psychological behavior and crowd evacuation animation. A comprehensive analysis of logical patterns of behavior and crowd evacuation is presented first. The interactive effects of information (objective and subjective), psychology (panic, small groups, and conflicting roles), and six kinds of behavior contribute to a more effective understanding of an emergency scene and assist in making scientific decisions. Based on these studies, a wide range of perspectives on crowd formation and evacuation animation models is summa- rized. Collision avoidance is underlined as a special topic. Finally, this paper highlights some of the technical challenges and key questions to be addressed by future developments in this rapidly developing field.

Visual Information Based Social Force Model for Crowd Evacuation

With the increase in large-scale incidents in real life, crowd evacuation plays a pivotal role in ensuring the safety of human crowds during emergency situations. The behavior patterns of crowds are well rendered by existing crowd dynamics models. However, most related studies ignore the information perception of pedestrians.To overcome this issue, we develop a visual information based social force model to simulate the interpretable evacuation process from the perspective of visual perception. Numerical experiments indicate that the evacuation efficiency and decision-making ability promote rapidly within a small range with the increase in unbalanced prior knowledge. The propagation of acceleration behavior caused by emergencies is asymmetric due to the anisotropy of visual information. Therefore, this model effectively characterizes the effect of visual information on crowd evacuation and provides new insights into the information perception of individuals in complex scenarios.

Research on the influence of building convex exit on crowd evacuation and its design optimization

Building exit has always been an emphasis of research in the field of evacuation.Existing studies on crowd flow characteristics at building evacuation bottlenecks usually focus on plane exit,but insufficient attention has been paid to the characteristics of crowd flow at the convex exit.Convex exit can be considered as such a structure like a double-bottleneck linked passage.This paper aims to study the influence of geometric structure characteristics of the convex exit on crowd evacuation and put forward the optimal design strategy of this structure,so as to improve the efficiency of evacuation in an emergency.Using social force model-based software,MassMotion,it is found that convex exit is indeed more efficient and safer than common plane exit in terms of evacuation time and pedestrians'congestion,especially when the desired speed is relatively higher,indicating that convex exits are more suitable for crowd evacuation in case of emergency.Four size-related parameters of convex exit are analyzed in detail,namely the width of the bottleneck at passage(W_(p)),the passage width(W),the passage length(L),and the exit width(W_(e)),to find out the optimum design of convex exit.The research shows that the optimal size ratio is that Wp:W:L:We equals 1.5:1.75:3.5:1,and as the overall magnification of building size and the number of pedestrians increases,the evacuation time gradually tends to a stable value,which indicates that this optimal ratio has good adaptability in size effect.Finally,based on the in-depth mechanism of pedestrian flow at the convex exit,three possible application scenarios are proposed to illustrate the feasible optimum design of the convex exit.The results of this study can provide new ideas for research on the structure of building exits.

Crowd evacuation simulation model with soft computing optimization techniques:a systematic literature review

Crowd evacuation simulation is an essential element when it comes to planning and preparation in evacuation management.This paper presents the survey based on systematic literature review(SLR)technique that aims to identify the crowd evacuation under microscopic model integrated with soft computing technique from previous works.In the review process,renowned databases were searched to retrieve the primary articles and total 38 studies were thoroughly studied.The researcher has identified the potential optimization factors in simulating crowd evacuation and research gaps based on acquired issues,limitation and challenges in this domain.The results of this SLR will serve as a guideline for the researchers that have same interest to develop better and effective crowd evacuation simulation model.The future direction from this SLR also suggests that there is a potential to hybrid the model with softcomputing optimization focusing on latest nature-inspired algorithms in improving the crowd evacuation model.

Building Evacuate Module for Urban Underground Passages: Subway Station in Turkey

The primary goal of crowd evacuation in urban underground passages or subways is to evacuate as many evacuees as possible to safe areas in the shortest time when emergency events occur. This paper chooses the underground passages of one metro in Istanbul, Turkey as research object, and uses a study method which combines by sites investigation, field test and computer simulation of the creating new software. It is called Building Evacuate Module software. We present a depth analysis of the related factors which include the number and width of passage, channelization setting and the number of pedestrians with the evacuation time. And the influential effect of public opinion is explained by using big data technology. In addition, pedestrians evacuation condition are recorded in three evacuation period, the morning peak, common and evening peak by the observation and statistic obtained with video, and build the model to simulate the change of evacuation time with pedestrians. So it reveals when the number of pedestrians reaches to more than 200, evacuation time increases significantly and the field experiment and simulation condition are consistent basically.

Performance-Based Design for Large Crowd Venue Control Using a Multi-Agent Model

Performance-based design is more holistic and flexible than prescriptive design for providing safety in large complex buildings. Here, a multi-agent method to model the egress patterns of evacuees is combined with a microscopic pedestrian simulation model used to analyze the forces between individuals in a densely populated enclosed space in a crowd crushing and trampling analysis （CroC＆Ts）. The system is used to model egress patterns in a typical crowd evacuation simulation. The simulations indicate that some individuals will die from crushing in 2 m and 4 m wide exits in emergencies. The simulations also show that the fatality probability increases when barriers obstacled the path and when the egress distances were lar- ger. The simulations validate the conclusions of the stranded crowd model （SCM） and provide quantitative predictions of the crowd crushing and trampling risk. Therefore, the CroC＆Ts can provide performancebased egress designs for large pubic buildings and improve crowd safety management and emergency planning.

Fire evacuation visualization in nursing homes based on agent and cellular automata

As China’s population ages and the notion of contemporary people evolves,an increasing number of elderly people opt to spend their final years in a nursing home.Recently,there have been more fires in nursing facilities for the elderly.As a result,using computer simulation technology,this paper creates an evacuation micro-simulation model for the elderly and nursing staff,investigates the impact of psychological characteristics and evacuation behavior of the elderly and nursing staffon fire escape during the fire evacuation process,and designs fire evacuation for nursing homes.Based on the nursing home’s regular evacuation paradigm,the study examines the behavioral elements.To simulate the three models and the influence of various behavioral and psychological features on fire evacuation,the authors utilized the MATLAB software,which is based on Agent theory and cellular automata.The simulation results show that the three models proposed in this study are capable of accurately describing reality.

Does a large group of pedestrians follow the evacuation signs?An experimental study

Guidance signs are generally considered to be key in improving the efficiency of emergency building evacuations.During a group evacuation,how obedient is the group to the evacuation signs?Would different evacuation signs affect the judgment of evacuated groups?Evacuation experiments were conducted to explore the influence of evacuation signs on the path selection of evacuation groups.Fourteen classes with 514 participants participated in these experiments,and each class participated in one experiment.Six classes conducted the experiments without guidance signs,and the rest conducted the experiments with guidance signs.The influences of the sign’s color(red and green),pattern(arrow and running man),and status(whether it flashes)on the route selection were studied.The results show that(1)the evacuation signs significantly affect the route choices of the evacuated groups.(2)The herding effect during the evacuation process does not influence the guiding effect of evacuation signs.(3)Evacuation signs of different colors and patterns have different guiding effects,and the Green running man sign has the best effect.(4)The constant bright,or flashing evacuation sign corresponding to the flashing Red running man has a significant impact on the route selection of the evacuated group.The results may provide a reference for improving the emergency evacuation guidance model of office buildings or other buildings with a large flow of people and optimize ideas for the design and layout of emergency evacuation signs.