Agent-based modeling and simulation on emergency evacuation

Abstract

Crowd stampedes and evacuation induced by panic caused by emergences often lead to fatalities as people are crushed, injured, trampled or even dead. Such phenomena may be triggered in life-threatening situations such as fires, explosions in crowded buildings. Emergency evacuation simulation has recently attracted the interest of a rapidly increasing number of scientists. This paper presents an Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation using Repast software to construct crowd evacuations for emergency response from an area under a fire. Various types of agents and different attributes of agents are designed in contrast to traditional modeling. The attributes that govern the characteristics of the people are studied and tested by iterative simulations. Simulations are also conducted to demonstrate the effect of various parameters of agents. Some interesting results were observed such as "faster is slower" and the ignorance of available exits. At last, simulation results suggest practical ways of minimizing the harmful consequences of such events and the existence of an optimal escape strategy. © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.