The role of crowd behavior and cooperation strategies during evacuation

Crowd dynamics have constituted a hotspot of research in recent times, particularly in areas where developmental progress has taken place in crowd evacuation for ensuring human safety. In high-density crowd events which happen frequently, panic or an emergency can lead to an increase in congestion which may cause disastrous incidents. Crowd control planning via simulation of people’s movement and behavior can promote safe departures from a space, despite threatening circumstances. Up until now, the evolution of distinctive types of crowd behavior towards cooperative flow remains unexplored. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the impact of potential crowd behavior, namely best-response, risk-seeking, risk-averse, and risk-neutral agents in achieving cooperation during evacuation and its connection with evacuation time using a game-theoretic evacuation simulation model. We analyze the crowd evacuation of a rectangular room with either a single-door or multiple exits in a continuous space. Simulation results show that mutual cooperation during evacuation can be realized when the agents’ population is dominated by risk-averse agents. The results also demonstrate that the risk-seeking agents tend toward aggressiveness by opting for a defector strategy regardless of the local crowd densities, while other crowd behavior shows cooperation under high local crowd densit

Intelligent evacuation management systems: A review

Crowd and evacuation management have been active areas of research and study in the recent past. Various developments continue to take place in the process of efficient evacuation of crowds in mass gatherings. This article is intended to provide a review of intelligent evacuation management systems covering the aspects of crowd monitoring, crowd disaster prediction, evacuation modelling, and evacuation path guidelines. Soft computing approaches play a vital role in the design and deployment of intelligent evacuation applications pertaining to crowd control management. While the review deals with video and nonvideo based aspects of crowd monitoring and crowd disaster prediction, evacuation techniques are reviewed via the theme of soft computing, along with a brief review on the evacuation navigation path. We believe that this review will assist researchers in developing reliable automated evacuation systems that will help in ensuring the safety of the evacuees especially during emergency evacuation scenarios

Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Time Critical Mass Evacuation Simulation Combining A Multi- Agent System and High-Performance Computing

This chapter presents an application of multi-agent systems to simulate tsunami-triggered mass evacuations of large urban areas. The main objective is to quantitatively evaluate various strategies to accelerate evacuation in case of a tsunami with a short arrival time, taking most influential factors into account. Considering the large number of lives in fatal danger, instead of widely used simple agents in 1D networks, we use a high-resolution model of environment and complex agents so that wide range of influencing factors can be taken into account. A brief description of the multi-agent system is provided using a mathematical framework as means to easily and unambiguously refer to the main components of the system. The environment of the multi-agent system, which mimics the physical world of evacuees, is modelled as a hybrid of a high-resolution grid and a graph connecting traversable spaces. This hybrid of raster and vector data structures enables modelling large domain in a scalable manner. The agents, which mimic the heterogeneous crowd of evacuees, are composed of different combinations of basic constituent functions for modelling interaction with each other and environment, decision-making, etc. The results of tuning and validating of constituent functions for pedestrian-pedestrian, car-car and car-pedestrian interactions are presented. A scalable high-performance computing (HPC) extension to address the high-computational demand of complex agents and high-resolution model of environment is briefly explained. Finally, demonstrative applications that highlight the need for including sub-meter details in the environment, different modes of evacuation and behavioural differences are presented

Flood modelling and hazard assessment for extreme events in Riverine Basin

Throughout the history of mankind, floods have caused destruction and negatively impacted communities. Recently, effects of climate change and the increasing rate of anthropic activities in flood-prone areas are aggravating the dangers posed by floods to people. Hence, it is crucial to have a better understanding of flood hazard aspects, particularly when considering pedestrians. Indeed, one of the main reasons for fatality during flood events is walking through floodwaters. Although authorities strongly advise against wading in floodwaters, people continue this dangerous behaviour. Alternatively, evacuations or the accessing of flooded areas by emergency services might be necessary. The scope of this research work is to contribute to improving flood hazard assessment and to the design of flood evacuation plans from a pedestrian perspective. To enhance flood hazard assessment a mechanics-based method has been improved by considering effects of terrain slope and updating values of human body characteristics, as well considering body mass index to identify the critical pedestrian category. Different criteria to assess flood hazard have been considered, including the revised mechanics-based approach reported herein. Results from the application of the different criteria to two different case studies, namely Boscastle and Borth, showed that methods based on a full physical analysis, and which also consider human characteristics, give more insight and reliability in assessing flood hazard, especially when considering pedestrians. Results in terms of flood hazard assessments can be used to: i) design evacuation plans; ii) identify hotspots in the study area which will help with prioritisation of the adaption measures; iii) improve resilience of sites prone to flooding and plan more resilient future developments. In this regard this research work proposes a novel approach to increasing flood resilience by retrofitting existing infrastructures to enhance evacuation and access routes by reducing flood hazard rate. Results of the application of this novel methodology to the aforementioned case studies highlighted that retrofitting small portions of the existing roads can enhance iii people’s safety during the evacuation, and hence provide a cost-effective solution to improve the resilience of the existing environment

Role of opinion sharing on the emergency evacuation dynamics

Emergency evacuation is a critical research topic and any improvement to the existing evacuation models will help in improving the safety of the evacuees. Currently, there are evacuation models that have either an accurate movement model or a sophisticated decision model. Individuals in a crowd tend to share and propagate their opinion. This opinion sharing part is either implicitly modeled or entirely overlooked in most of the existing models. Thus, one of the overarching goal of this research is to the study the effect of opinion evolution through an evacuating crowd. First, the opinion evolution in a crowd was modeled mathematically. Next, the results from the analytical model were validated with a simulation model having a simple motion model. To improve the fidelity of the evacuation model, a more realistic movement and decision model were incorporated and the effect of opinion sharing on the evacuation dynamics was studied extensively. Further, individuals with strong inclination towards particular route were introduced and their effect on overall efficiency was studied. Current evacuation guidance algorithms focuses on efficient crowd evacuation. The method of guidance delivery is generally overlooked. This important gap in guidance delivery is addressed next. Additionally, a virtual reality based immersive experiment is designed to study factors affecting individuals\u27 decision making during emergency evacuation

人・ユーザー中心の移動サービスと群集マネジメントのためのモデリング，シミュレーションと最適化

Tohoku University博士（情報科学）thesi