Simulation Study of Pedestrians Evacuation Considering Aggressive Behavior

Abstract

Conflict during an evacuation may turn into aggressive behavior and create problems for evacuation. To study the influence of attack behaviors such as pushing and shoving on evacuation and the evacuation law, an extended cellular automata model is developed in this paper. In the model, pedestrian movement is influenced by static, dynamic, and attack floor fields. In addition, pedestrian vision is influenced by the direction and location of movement of surrounding pedestrians, and pedestrians adopt different coping strategies for attacks: avoidance detour, or imitation. Attacker movement and aggressive behavior are also studied. Numerical simulations are conducted to discuss the pedestrian evacuation problem under attack behavior. The effects of the evacuation process, attack field sensitivity coefficient, location of fallen pedestrians, pedestrian density, number of initial attackers, initial attacker location, and pedestrian imitation ratio on evacuation time and number of fallen pedestrians are analyzed. The simulation results show that an appropriate increase in the impact of the attack field can slow down the congestion, that is, the evacuation time is the fastest at k_A = 0.5. The evacuation time is faster when the room is full of normal pedestrians or full of attacking pedestrians. The number of casualty pairs is high when the initial position of the attacker is in the middle of the inner side of the room. The results of the study can provide recommendations and guidance for the formulation of evacuation strategies for pushing and shoving type attacks and reducing casualties.