Crowd Evacuation Conflicts Simulation Based Cellular Automaton Integrating Game Theory

Abstract

Developing and rehearsing crowd evacuation plans in crowd gathering situations can improve evacuation efficiency and reduce safety accidents. However, pedestrians can create resource conflicts with other pedestrians competing for evacuation routes during crowd evacuation. Inspired by cellular automata and game theory, this paper proposes a crowd evacuation model that integrates cellular automata and game theory to solve the conflicts among pedestrians in the evacuation process. In the model construction, we construct a basic crowd evacuation model using a cellular automaton, formulate a game rule for pedestrians’ conflict according to the prisoner’s dilemma, and integrate the pedestrians’ update strategy into the cellular automaton. The model’s validity is verified in the experiments by comparing the update and non-update strategies, and the crowd evacuation is visualized and simulated by constructing a stadium scenario. The experimental results show that the crowd evacuation model incorporating the pedestrian conflict game rules is more realistic and will improve the crowd evacuation efficiency if the pedestrians adopt the cooperative strategy.