A simulation tool for modelling pedestrian dynamics during evacuation of large areas

The movement of large numbers of people is important in many situations, such as the evacuation of a building in an emergency. In this paper, pedestrian dynamics during the evacuation of large areas is simulated using a computational intelligent technique, based on Cellular Automata. The characteristic feature of the proposed model is that the crowd consists of independent parts rather than treated as homogeneous mass. The crowd behaviour is artificially formatted by the response of each of these parts to the rule according to which each pedestrian reaches one of the possible exits. Furthermore, an efficient graphical user interface has been developed, in order to study various hypotheses concerning the pedestrians' activity features. Collisions among pedestrians have been encountered while collective effects prominent at crowd behaviour have been also realised during simulation. Finally, the presence of fixed as well as user-defined moveable obstacles has been taken into account.