Route choice in pedestrian evacuation: formulated using a potential field

Abstract

A method for formulating the route choice behavior of pedestrians in evacuation in closed areas with internal obstacles is proposed. The method is implemented in a pedestrian model, in which the route choice is determined by the potential of discrete space. The potential measures the total effect of such factors affecting route choice as route distance, pedestrian congestion and route capacity. Using scenario simulations, the proposed method is compared with several existing methods. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can simulate two classes of phenomena that cannot be reproduced accurately by those existing methods. In addition, two examples of inefficient evacuation as regards route choice are given. The two examples illustrate that, for improving the efficiency of evacuation, excessive or limited sensitivity of pedestrians to the route capacity may be unhelpful, and adding an extra route may be inefficient.

A phenomenological operator description of dynamics of crowds: Escape strategies

“…, n b L 2 ) introduced before is all made by zeros. Of course, it is also natural, in this case (even if not strictly Figure 3: Setting S 1 : at t = 0 the population P a is located in the cells (1, 1), (2, 8) and (7,8). The black cells O 1 , O 2 , O 3 represents the obstacles, and the exit cell U is located at (11,2).…”

“…For this kind of configuration the case ω a ∂O = ω b ∂O = 1 and ω a ∂O = ω b ∂O = 10 are almost indistinguishable, while for ω a ∂O = ω b ∂O = 50, 100 a quite evident variation is visible with respect to the case ω a ∂O = ω b ∂O = 1. Figure 11: Setting S hd 2 : at t = 0 the population P a is located in the cells (1, 1), (8,2), (5,4), (9,4), (2,8), (7,8), (9,10), while P b is located in the cells (5, 2), (1, 3), (8,5), (2, 7), (2,8), (4,9), (1, 10), (7,10). The black cells O 1 , O 2 , O 3 represents the obstacles, and the exit cell U is located at (11,2).…”

“…Among these methods we can quote those based on lattice gas and cellular automata (see, for example, Refs. [2,3,4,5,6,7]) which revealed really consistent in several contexts: they are interesting microscopic models which often can not properly simulate some typical high-pressure phenomena arising from the contact forces during the evacuation of a crowd. To account for these high-pressure phenomena, as well as other collective behaviors of a crowd, approaches based on force-models can be used (see, for example, Refs.…”

Pedestrian simulations in hexagonal cell local field model

“…Generally, these models can be classified into macroscopic models [1][2][3] and microscopic models [4][5][6][7]. The former class treated the pedestrians as a fluid.…”

Potential field cellular automata model for pedestrian flow

“…Pedestrian dynamics has been studied for decades, with a large variety of powerful models proposed, including the continuum (or macroscopic) model [1][2][3][4][5][6][7], the social force model [8][9][10], and the cellular automata (CA) model [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The continuum model adopts hydrodynamic or gas-kinetic equations to describe the behavior of pedestrian crowds.…”