Simulation of evacuation processes using a bionics-inspired cellular automaton model for pedestrian dynamics

By Ansgar Kirchner, Andreas Schadschneider. 2002

990 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present simulations of evacuation processes using a recently introduced cellular automaton model for pedestrian dynamics. This model applies a bionics approach to describe the interaction between the pedestrians using ideas from chemotaxis. Here we study a rather simple situation, namely the evacuation from a large room with one or two doors. It is shown that the variation of the model parameters allows to describe different types of behaviour, from regular to panic. We find a non-monotonic dependence of the evacuation times on the coupling constants. These times depend on the strength of the herding behaviour, with minimal evacuation times for some intermediate values of the couplings, i.e., a proper combination of herding and use of knowledge about the shortest way to the exit.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/911ff1c1ffbfcf57da156b61298cc353688840a6

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Citations in the corpus

Continuum crowds (2006, methodology): “Precomputed , static potential functions have also been used to study evacuation [Kirchner and Schadschneider 2002].”
Evacuation Dynamics: Empirical Results, Modeling and Applications (2008, background): “The floor field CA [13, 14, 86, 167] can also be considered as an extension of the ASEP.”
Cellular automaton model for evacuation process with obstacles (2007, result): “A Thus, different (and, in principle, reasonable) choices of the ﬂoor ﬁeld lead to behavior which is different not only quantitatively but also qualitatively, in contrast with some previous statements in the literature [22].”
Floor Fields for Tracking in High Density Crowd Scenes (2008, background): “The concept of a floor field is inspired by the field of evacuation dynamics [1, 2], where floor fields are manually designed to simulate behaviors of pedestrians in panic situations.”
Generalized centrifugal-force model for pedestrian dynamics. (2010, background): “However, a qualitative description is not sufficient if reliable statements about critical processes, e.g., emergency egress, are required.”
Crowd analysis: a survey (2008, methodology): “[51] apply a bionics approach to the cellular automation model by describing the interaction between the pedestrians using ideas from chemotaxis.”
Panic, Irrationality, and Herding: Three Ambiguous Terms in Crowd Dynamics Research (2019, neutral): “These quotes ranged from suggesting that herding behaviour is a detriment to efficient evacuations [37, 49] to those that believe this effect is still unestablished [39, 40, 50] and that there may be scenarios where herding tendencies are beneficial to an escaping crowd [18].”
Modeling crowd evacuation of a building based on seven methodological approaches (2009, methodology): “[18] used a computational intelligent technique-based cellular automata to simulate pedestrian dynamics during the evacuation of large areas and reproduce some phenomena of crowd dynamics such as clogging and mass behavior; Kirchner and Schadschneider [19] proposed a bionicsinspired cellular automat”