Emergency Planning for UAV-Controlled Crowd Evacuations

Afnan Alhindi,Deem Alyami,A B M Alim Al Islam,Aziza Alsubki,Razan Almousa,Najla Al Nabhan,Heba Kurdi

doi:10.3390/app11199009

Abstract

One of the most challenging problems during disasters involving crowds is pedestrian evacuation. It is very important in such situations to improve survival rates by getting all or most of the people out in the shortest possible time. Technological intervention through augmenting the evacuation process using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) exhibits great potential in improving survival rates, but the exploration of this method is still in its infancy. Therefore, this study explores the potential of utilizing UAVs for crowd management during emergency evacuations. We conducted a rigorous study, using a simulation model featuring four UAVs and differing numbers of pedestrians, with use of two UAV guidance approaches: partial guidance and full guidance. The experimental results suggest that exploiting UAVs in crowd evacuation and following the partial guidance approach can lead to a more efficient evacuation process.

Highlights

As the rate of both natural and manmade disasters—fires, explosions, earthquakes, etc.—in populated areas is increasing, people are becoming more concerned about emergencies in which areas need to be evacuated promptly [1,2,3,4]
We present and discusses the effect of using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the evacuation process, presenting measurements of the average evacuation time and mortality resulting from the use of partial and full guidance models with different crowd densities
35%, but it increased to more than 40% when the exit doors were adjacent. These results clearly show that adopting UAVs in the evacuation process leads to a more efficient evacuation process compared with using none, as it reduces Average evacuation time (AET) and mortality regardless of the location of UAVs and exit doors

Summary

Introduction

As the rate of both natural and manmade disasters—fires, explosions, earthquakes, etc.—in populated areas is increasing, people are becoming more concerned about emergencies in which areas need to be evacuated promptly [1,2,3,4] In such situations, people often panic, fearing losing their lives, and look for a quick exit to escape. Emergency pedestrian evacuation is considered an extremely important research problem to be solved for any crowd management process. UAVs can be used to conduct partial guidance or full guidance (these approaches will be elaborated further in Section 3) during an evacuation process As these important factors are yet to be investigated in the literature, this paper examines the notions of crowd guidance using UAVs in depth through studying diverse scenarios

Methods

Results

Conclusion