Some properties of the floor field cellular automata evacuation model

We study the process of evacuation of pedestrians from the room with the given arrangement of doors and obstacles by using the cellular automata technique. The technique which became quite popular is characterized by the discretization of time as well as space. For such a discretized space we use so-called floor field model which generally corresponds to the description of every cell by some monotonic function of distance between this cell and the closest exit. We study several types of effects. We start from some general features of model like the kind of a neighborhood or the factors disrupting the motion. Then we analyze the influence of asymmetry and size on the evacuation time. Finally we show characteristics concerning different arrangements of exits and include a particular approach to the proxemics effects. The scaling analyses help us to distinguish these cases which just reflect the geometry of the system and those which depend also on the simulation properties. All calculations are performed for a wide range of initial densities corresponding to different occupation rates as described by the typical crowd counting techniques. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.