Cellular automaton model for evacuation process with obstacles

Abstract

A bidimensional cellular automaton model is used to simulate the process of evacuation of pedestrians in a room with fixed obstacles. A floor field is defined so that moving to a cell with lower floor field means approaching an exit door. The model becomes non-deterministic by introducing a ''panic'' parameter, given by a probability of not moving, and by a random choice to resolve conflicts in the update of pedestrian positions. Two types of exit doors are considered: single (where only one person can pass) and double (two persons can pass simultaneously). For a double door, the longest evacuation time turns out to occur for a very traditional location of the door. The optimum door position is determined. Replacing the double door by two single doors does not improve evacuation times noticeably. On the other hand, for a room without obstacles, a simple scaling law is proposed to model the dependence of evacuation time with the number of persons and exit width. This model fails when obstacles are present, as their presence introduces local bottlenecks whose effect outweighs the benefits of increasing door width beyond a certain threshold. r

A Dynamic Indoor Field Model for Emergency Evacuation Simulation

“…A field-based model defines the evacuation behavior of personnel at each simulated time point by defining the floor field of a scene and describing the flow trends of individuals in that scene [40][41][42][43]. The floor field relates to only the geometric layout and exit location of the room.…”

Robot-Assisted Crowd Evacuation under Emergency Situations: A Survey

“…Agents can also be modeled individually with different characteristics to make them act independently and enhance the reliability of the system as a whole [25]. These characteristics are necessary to identify these agents as independent components of an application.…”

“…ViCrowd can be used to model different social groups (friends, family, etc.) in an easy way, which gives the simulation more flexibility in modeling social factors within the crowd simulation [25].…”

A Fire Spread Model Based on Cellular Automaton

“…In the study of Murosaki et al ,the fire spread model was advanced .It showed that the fire spread most strongly affect by the weather conditions and the building materials [5] .…”

“…The ti me t 1 is looked as the cell [kl] starts bur ning to when it began to spread of fire after catch fire. a is the len gth of one cell ,which usually is 4 m. d ，which is an un fixed vari able, will changes according to the time and condi tions [5,6] . For a given certain wind speed ，D is the fire can spread farthest distance, and calculated by [6] D =1.15(5 + 0.5V) (4) where V is the wind velo city.…”