A cellular automata based crowd behavior model

Abstract

This paper presents a Cellular Automata (CA) based crowd behavior model which mimics movements of humans in an indoor environment. Because of the increasing population in modern cities, the understanding of crowd behavior in the urban environment has become a crucial issue in emergency management. In the proposed crowd behavior model, pedestrians are confined to move in a cellular space where their movements are determined by their own status and the surrounding environment characteristics. A pedestrian's behavior is constructed from several attributes: including the "walking toward goal" behavior, "collision and congestion avoidance" behavior, "grouping" behavior and path smoothness. Simulations have been carried out with a crowd consisting of thirty pedestrians in an indoor environment to validate the model. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.