Strategy evolution of panic pedestrians in emergent evacuation with assailants based on susceptible-infected-susceptible model

Abstract

Panic pedestrian evacuation in emergent situations with assailants is of great practical significance. Although game theory have been applied to analyze pedestrians’ decision making in pedestrian evacuation, there are fewer works addressing strategy evolution of panic pedestrians in emergent evacuation with assailants. To fill this gap, this paper built a new model for emergent evacuation with assailants (called EEA-SIS) based on Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible model (SIS). In our model, pedestrians’ decision-making is guided by game theory models . Pedestrian-relationship network is built to indicate pedestrians’ interaction. The process of changing evacuation strategy between cooperation and defection is indicated through the SIS model on this pedestrian-relationship network. Experiments are conducted on four different social dilemmas related to four evacuation scenarios. The simulation results show that with the evolution of pedestrian-relationship network, the evolution trend of different types of pedestrians’ strategies has changed significantly. A sensitivity test is carried out to investigates the influence of panic value on the strategy evolution of pedestrians and show the possible behavior changes of them. Several useful results are obtained for safety management. Finally, comparison experiments show that both evacuation time and casualty in our model are less than those in the classical agent-based model for all evacuation scenarios.