Modeling crowd evacuation of a building based on seven methodological approaches

Crowd evacuation of a building has been studied over the last decades. In this paper, seven methodological approaches for crowd evacuation have been identified. These approaches include cellular automata models, lattice gas models, social force models, fluid-dynamic models, agent-based models, game theoretic models, and approaches based on experiments with animals. According to available literatures, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches, and conclude that a variety of different kinds of approaches should be combined to study crowd evacuation. Psychological and physiological elements affecting individual and collective behaviors should be also incorporated into the evacuation models. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.