Towards pedestrian room evacuation with a spatial game

Abstract

During the process of a real emergency evacuation, interactions among evacuees may vary with different positions, which are affected by many objective factors such as the density of crowds, the distance to the exit and so on. To better reproduce real crowd behavior in the process of an evacuation, we propose a spatial game to model the pedestrian room evacuation in a discrete lattice. In the game, each agent interacts with its immediate neighbors and chooses one of three possible modes of strategy that leads to patient, normal or impatient behavior. The payoffs of the game change with the evacuation conditions and each agent plays against its nearest neighbors for the expected evacuation time. The model shows how evacuation conditions affect behavioral evolution in an emergency evacuation.