Simulation of Evacuation Characteristics Using a 2-Dimensional Cellular Automata Model for Pedestrian Dynamics

Abstract

In public places, the high pedestrian density is one of the direct causes leading to crowding and trample disaster, so it is very necessary to investigate the collective and evacuation characteristics for pedestrian movement. In the occupants’ evacuation process, the people-people interaction and the people-environment interaction are sufficiently considered in this paper, which have been divided into the exit attraction, the repulsion force between people, the friction between people, the repulsion force between human and barrier, and the attraction of surrounding people. Through analyzing the existing models, a new occupant evacuation cellular automata (CA) model based on the social force model is presented, which overcomes the shortage of the high density crowd simulation and combines the advantages that CA has sample rules and faster calculating speed. The simulating result shows a great applicability for evacuation under the high density crowd condition, and the segregation phenomena have also been found in the bidirectional pedestrian flow. Besides these, setting isolated belt near the exit or entrance of underpass not only remarkably decreases the density and the risk of tramper disaster but also increases the evacuation efficiency, so it provides a new idea for infrastructure design about the exits and entrances.