Cellular automaton model with turning behavior in crowd evacuation

Daiki Miyagawa and Genki Ichinose

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2020, vol. 549, issue C

Abstract: Effective evacuation policies in emergency situations are important to save lives. To develop such policies, simulation models based on cellular automata have been used for crowd evacuation dynamics. In most previous studies of crowd evacuations, an evacuee is represented by a 1 × 1 square. However, a rectangle (1 × 2) representation is more suitable for such models than the square representation because of evacuees’ shoulder width. The rectangle representation gives two new features to evacuees’ behaviors: moving sideways and turning. We study the effects of these behaviors on crowd evacuation dynamics. Hence, we constructed a cellular automaton model where evacuees whose shoulder widths are 1 × 2 try to escape from a room in an emergency situation. The simulation results showed that turning behavior can make the evacuation time shorter and there is an optimal turning rate for the crowd evacuation. Our findings contribute to the effective control of evacuees in emergency situations.

Keywords: Crowd evacuation; Cellular automaton; Simulation; Turning behavior; Multi-grid model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437120301412
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:549:y:2020:i:c:s0378437120301412

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2020.124376

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().