Group structures facilitate emergency evacuation

Abstract

The motion of pedestrian crowds can be described as if they are subject to "social forces". Grouping, as a common phenomenon in pedestrian behaviors, plays a decisive role in affecting evacuation efficiency. Here we propose two different group evacuation (GE) regimes, namely the leaderless GE and leadership GE, to explore the evacuation dynamics of groupstructured pedestrians. Simulation results show that elevating sizes or numbers of these groups can promote evacuation efficiency when individuals all try to move fast, in contrast to the case of small desired velocities. More importantly, with the same group size and group number, leadership GE outperforms leaderless GE, implying the positive effect of adopting appropriate community leaders. We hope that these observations could provide some insight into pedestrians' collective action during the evacuation process.

Determining Subway Emergency Evacuation Efficiency Using Hybrid System Dynamics and Multiple Agents

“…A visual parameter was added into the simulation model to prejudge the exit congestion and to help the group by selecting the best evacuation exit. In [22], the authors proposed two different group evacuation (GE) regimes, namely, leaderless GE and leadership GE, to explore the evacuation dynamics of group-structured pedestrians. In [23], the authors studied crowd tangential change behaviors and their mutual processes, as well as revealed the relationship between the tangential change behaviors and the crowd density, thus providing a theoretical basis for multichannel evacuation organizations and expanding the theoretical space for evacuation crowd dynamics.…”

Emergency evacuation from multi-exits rooms in the presence of obstacles

“…Scientists of quite diverse domains, in recent years, have been dedicated to uncovering the fundamental mechanism and underlying evolutionary dynamics of people's collective behavior in society [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Emergency evacuation, as a typical collective behavior of pedestrians, plays an important role in traffic safety issues and congestion problems [9][10][11]. Until now, many mathematical models have been proved to be able to efficiently characterize pedestrian crowds during evacuation.…”

“…In order to describe more realistic scenarios, extended SFMs have received increasing attention in recent years [11,25,26]. For indoor evacuation scenarios, an interesting question arises whether the existence of obstacles always inhibits evacuation efficiency.…”

The cellular automata evacuation model based on Er /M/1 distribution

“…However, due to the randomness and fuzzy attributes of pedestrian behaviors, it is very difficult to carry out quantitative analysis and experimental simulation for the crowd emergency evacuation behaviors. At present, studies on pedestrian flow simulation are mainly divided into two types, namely macroscopic simulation and microscopic simulation [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. In terms of macroscopic pedestrian simulation, with the whole pedestrian flow as the object of study, pedestrian flow is compared to gas or fluid, and the pneumodynamic and hydromechanic models are applied to the pedestrian study.…”