Modeling and simulation of evacuation movement in emergency

This paper presents a cellular automata-based model to simulate the collective behavior of pedestrians who evacuate from congested public facility when accident such as fire or explosion happens. Proper motivator and special simulation technique considering pedestrian judgement and psychology were used to make the movement rule more reasonable. The cellular automata-based model makes it possible to simulate the pedestrian behavior at the micro-level and to observe the performance traits at the macro-level. Individual sensitivity to the level of difference of queue size between current target exit and adjacent exits, and individual activity of exit changing were put forth as important factors in pedestrian decision and evacuation time. Simulation experiments with typical conditions ran at a range of densities for the study of relationship between individual behavior and evacuation time. The results show that high sensitivity and high ratio of active pedestrians have active effect on the evacuation performance. The results of the simulation indicate that the behavior that arises from the model captures the fundamental rules of pedestrian movements in emergencies. The model is helpful for safe design and functionality evaluation of public facilities.