A Heterogeneous Cellular Automata Model for Crowd Evacuation in Emergency Situations

Abstract

The modeling of crowd evacuation plays a crucial role in serving the safety management under emergency conditions. However, pedestrian heterogeneity is often ignored in most studies, resulting in the deviation between simulations and real situations. Therefore, this paper develop a heterogeneous cellular automata (CA) model by considering pedestrian heterogeneity from the aspect of physiology and psychology, and their dynamic changes are incorporated into the update rules for movement direction, speed, and conflict resolution mechanism. By conducting numerical simulations, the effects of pedestrian heterogeneity on evacuation process, evacuation efficiency, and conflict and competition are analyzed in detail. Moreover, this paper provides a framework for the application of heterogeneous characteristics in evacuation models, which can further be used to guide relevant research in the fields of intelligent transportation and safety science.