Multi-agent simulation of emergency evacuation on the sidewalk

Transportation evacuation study has become a research focus in recent years. This paper deals with emergency evacuation on the sidewalk using agent-based simulation. The current study develops a traffic simulator within NetLogo, an agent-based environment. Two sub-models are proposed including facility sub-model to describe global path planning of evacuee and evacuee sub-model to describe the evacuee behavior. We conducted simulations to investigate the effect of generation position of evacuees and the proportion of choosing bus on evacuation through a case study. Simulation results indicate that the proposed model can well address the interaction among evacuees with different evacuation modes, and if evacuees choosing bus evacuate near bus station and evacuees choosing walk evacuate away from bus station, then average walking time of evacuees and maximum density in statistical area are relatively small.