Evacuation Control of Crowds of Pedestrians: Distributed or Decentralized?

Evacuation of crowds in a corridor with only one exit has been considered in this paper where distributed controllers have been constructed to regulate the crowd's evacuation speed so that stampede tragedy can be avoided. Macroscopic model for crowds of pedestrians has been firstly derived based on inspiration of LWR (Lighthill Whitham and Richards) model and Greenshields model from traffic system where finite volume method has been introduced to simplify the obtained PDEs into finite ODEs. Distributed evacuation controllers have been constructed based on inspiration of multi-agent system and stability analysis of obtained closed-loop system has been simplified to linear system with the delicate controllers proposed. Comparisons between distributed evacuation controllers and previous evacuation controllers have also been presented to show the advantages and disadvantages of different controllers under different initial density of crowds so that tragedy of crowd stampede can be effectively avoided with appropriate selection of different controllers. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.