Study of Heterogeneous User Behavior in Crowd Evacuation in Presence of Wheelchair Users

Abstract

AbstractCrowd modeling is an area of study of increasing importance for understanding the dynamics of a crowd in an environment. Evacuation modeling focuses on how humans evacuate these environments as well as the intricacies and outcomes of the evacuation. Previous evacuation models do not take into account how human populations are physically heterogeneous as well as how the presence of wheelchair users affects an evacuation. In order to address the aforementioned open challenges, in this research, we propose a novel model to study the effect of wheelchair users in evacuation modeling. Our model is developed as an agent-based panic model and is built using the Unity gaming platform and includes speed, mass, and radius as the agent attributes. From the agent-based panic model, it was observed that larger wheelchair populations increased evacuation times while a larger number of and width of doorways decreased the evacuation times. Of the agent attributes in the panic model, speed had a negative correlation while mass and radius both had positive correlations with evacuation time. The findings from this study suggest that future crowd models may benefit in accuracy by using heterogeneous populations.KeywordsCrowd modelingEvacuationUser behaviorWheelchair users