Visualization of Emergency Evacuation Physical Behavior under Multi-Agent Decision-Making

Abstract

Emergency evacuation simulation is significant for architectural design and emergency plan implementation. To explore the influence of evacuees’ physical behavior and evacuees’ decisions on the evacuation process, as well as to address the problems of traditional emergency evacuation models with insufficient detail of the situation (realism), low reusability, poor operability, and lack of subsequent scalability, this paper first analyzed pedestrian characteristics in emergencies. To describe pedestrian decision-making in an emergent evacuation situation, a multi-agent design based on decision theory was proposed, solving the multi-agent decision-making problem in an emergency evacuation environment by the A* algorithm. Then the designed multi-agent was embedded into the social force model by AnyLogic software. Finally, the model reproduces the pedestrian evacuation process in an emergency evacuation situation on the built platform, depicting three kinds of typical behaviors: pedestrian partnering, obstacle avoidance, and exit competition. In addition, this study also analyzed a large student apartment building by example and proposed corresponding optimization solutions to improve its evacuation capacity through simulation results.