Simulating the Evacuation Process Involving Multitype Disabled Pedestrians

The study of crowd evacuation has received considerable attention as the frequent occurrence of crowd disasters in public places. Notably, the increasing proportion of disabled pedestrians makes vulnerable crowds an indispensable part of the evacuation process. However, most previous research neglects to introduce the motion characteristics of disabled pedestrians into the modeling of crowd evacuation. Therefore, we develop an extended model to simulate the evacuation process involving nondisabled, visual-disabled, acoustic-disabled, and physical-disabled pedestrians. Numerical simulations indicate that this model achieves a more realistic mixed crowd evacuation in the library scene and reproduces the escape movement of multitype disabled pedestrians. Moreover, several management strategies are provided to guide the evacuation of disabled pedestrians, and the appropriate strategy can be determined by comprehensively considering multiple factors such as efficiency, safety, and cost.