Effect of uncertainty on cooperative behaviors during an emergency evacuation

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to establish a computational model to understand the effect of environmental uncertainty on cooperative behaviors and evacuation efficiency during emergencies. A cellular automata evacuation model with behavioral extension is proposed based on a unified utility function for evacuation dynamics and behavior dynamics. Simulation results show that higher emergency will lower the cooperative frequency and the most evacuation efficiency is obtained when the emergency level is intermediate. Additionally, it is found that for the non-emergency evacuation scenario, cooperative frequency will be maintained at a high level, but evacuation efficiency will decrease with increasing uncertainty. And for emergency evacuation scenarios smaller or larger amount of uncertainty can promote cooperation and result in a higher evacuation efficiency. This work provides a new insight into crowd behaviors in an emergency evacuation.