The dynamics of pedestrians’ evacuation during emergency situations

Abstract

Emergencies like natural disasters and terrorist attacks, which are characterized by sudden onset situations, have always been part of the world’s reality. In these situations, collective human behavior such as crowd stampedes may be triggered. Sometimes stampedes lead to fatalities, as people are crushed or trampled. In this paper, a dynamic model for the evacuation of pedestrians during emergency situations is proposed with the consideration of information transmission in the crowd. In this model, based on a complex adaptive system, it is assumed that the information, part of which is psychology and behavior, has an influence on the interactions of pedestrians. We investigated two factors: (1) the systematic condition of information transmission and (2) the intensity of beneficial information that affects the interaction. Parameters of the factors are discussed to capture the dynamic features of the pedestrian crowd through proved theorems, and the critical values for effective evacuation are obtained. Finally, a numerical example for the evacuation of pedestrians is designed to validate the practicality of this model and mathematical demonstration.