Spatial games and memory effects on crowd evacuation behavior with Cellular Automata

When it comes to emergency evacuations of a big number of individuals from a certain room or a building, it is crucial that they should be able to exit the under study place in a quick and safe manner. Nevertheless, crowd behavior can be affected from various factors, among which are the distance from the exit, the visibility of the exit, the density of the crowd and how uncomfortable the conditions are inside the room for the crowd. In this study, we propose an evacuation model, in order to achieve a computationally enhanced simulation, based on Cellular Automata modeling, coupled with a Spatial Game to solve conflict situations among the anxious crowd. Additionally, aiming to a more realistic model, we added not only topological, but also behavioral characteristics coupled with the incorporation of different moving velocities and memory features to the evacuees. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.