Cellular automaton model with turning behavior in crowd evacuation

Abstract

Effective evacuation policies in emergency situations are important to save lives. To develop such policies, simulation models based on cellular automata have been used for crowd evacuation dynamics. In most previous studies of crowd evacuations, an evacuee is represented by a \(1 \times 1\) square. However, a rectangle (\(1 \times 2\)) representation is more suitable for such models than the square representation because of evacuees' shoulder width. The rectangle representation gives two new features to evacuees' behaviors: moving sideways and turning. We study the effects of these behaviors on crowd evacuation dynamics. Hence, we constructed a cellular automaton model where evacuees whose shoulder widths are \(1 \times 2\) try to escape from a room in an emergency situation. The simulation results showed that turning behavior can make the evacuation time shorter and there is an optimal turning rate for the crowd evacuation. Our findings contribute to the effective control of evacuees in emergency situations.