Research Issues in Agent-Based Simulation for Pedestrians Evacuation

Nur Siyam,Sherief Abdallah,Omar Alqaryouti

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2956880

Nur Siyam, Sherief Abdallah + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2956880

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Abstract

Crowd evacuation in emergencies may lead to fatalities if the evacuation plans were not tested and evaluated. Traditionally, evacuation drills have been, and still are, being used to assess evacuation plans. However, in recent years the simulation of evacuation plans during emergencies has emerged as a strong alternative that is cost effective and potentially more accurate. Agent-Based Simulation (ABS) is the preferred type of simulation for evacuation scenarios, due to its ability to model individual decision-making and social behaviour. In this paper we conduct meta-analysis of eighty-one peer-reviewed papers published between 2009 and 2019 that used ABS to model pedestrian evacuation. Our analysis assesses the current state-of-art and identifies opportunities for improvement. We identify seven dimensions over which the surveyed papers agree or differ. The dimensions include purpose of the simulation, type of emergency and environment considerations, type and scale of evacuated space, simulation software used, agents' characteristics and behaviour, support of evacuation policies, and analysis and validation. We conduct meta-analysis of the surveyed papers along the identified dimensions. One of the main findings of our analysis is the lack of a standardized validation methodology for ABS of emergency evacuation.

Highlights

Emergency management is a key activity in the planning for life-threatening events
It is worth noting that simulations of crowd behaviour and pedestrian dynamics in non-emergency situations are closely related to evacuation modelling
In this paper, agent-based simulation models for pedestrian evacuation were surveyed to assess the current state of art and identify opportunities for improvement

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Emergency management is a key activity in the planning for life-threatening events. The first step of emergency management includes developing an emergency evacuation plan to identify possible emergency scenarios [1]. Used Agent-Based simulation to model pedestrian evacuation. Papers simulating non-emergency scenarios were not included in this survey. To help answer these questions, we survey 81 peerreviewed published articles in which agent-based models were built for pedestrian evacuation. Contrary to Heath et al [5], this survey is focused on just one domain, which is pedestrians’ evacuation This is considered a contribution to the body of literature as ABS issues and challenges are quite domain dependent.

SIMULATION MODELS FOR EVACUATIONS

Findings

CONCLUSION