Title: Simulation model of pedestrians swarm in evacuation situations

Authors: Olfa Beltaief; Sameh El Hadouaj; Khaled Ghedira

Addresses: Research Group GR2IA, University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia ' Research Group GR2IA, Higher Colleges of Technology, Abu Dhabi, UAE ' Research Group GR2IA, University of Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia

Abstract: A swarm of pedestrians is a large group of individual agents that use autonomous coordination via local control laws. Their emergent behaviour allows crowds to have patterns which are not externally planned. Researchers prove that a crowd in emergency situations has a well-determined emergent behaviour. The pedestrian crowd simulation systems in case of emergency must have these emergent behaviours in order to prove its effectiveness. For this purpose we have created the E-PHuNAC model (Evacuation-Personalities' Human's Nature of Autonomous Crowds). Our model takes into account the three main perspectives for understanding the behaviour of crowds in an evacuation. Indeed, we have considered the normative affiliation, social identity and panic. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the E-PHuNAC model and also prove that the swarm behaviour of pedestrians' agents in this model allows the emergence of these global patterns. The conducted experiments are consistent with reality and can reproduce evacuation phenomena.

Keywords: simulation; modelling; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; pedestrian crowds; evacuation panic; emergent behaviours; pedestrians; pedestrian swarms; crowd evacuation; emergency evacuation; emergency management; crowd behaviour; normative affiliation; social identity; swarm behaviour.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2017.082267

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2017 Vol.55 No.1, pp.70 - 77

Received: 18 May 2015
Accepted: 10 Dec 2015
Published online: 14 Feb 2017 *

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