Optimizing crowd evacuation: evaluation of strategies for safety and efficiency

Abstract Predicting and controlling crowd dynamics in emergencies is one of the main objectives of simulated emergency exercises. However, during emergency exercises, there is often a lack of sense of danger by the actors involved and concerns about exposing real people to potentially dangerous environments. These problems impose limitations in running an emergency drill, harming the collection of valuable information for posterior analysis and decision-making. This work aims to mitigate these problems by using Agent Based Modelling (ABM) simulator to deepen the comprehension of human actions when exposed to a sudden variation in extensive crowded environmental conditions and how evacuation strategies affect evacuation performance. To assess the impact of the evacuation strategy employed, we propose a modified informed leader-flowing approach and compare it with common evacuation strategies in a simulated environment, replicating stadium benches with narrow corridors leading to different exit points. The objective is to determine the impact of each set of configurations and evacuation strategies and compare them against other established ones. Our experiments determined that agents following the crowd generally lead to a higher number of victims due to the rise of herding phenomena near the exits, which was significantly reduced when agents were guided towards the exit via knowing the exit beforehand or following leader agent with real-time information regarding exit location and exit current state, proving that relevant and controlled information in combination with Follow Leader strategies can be crucial in an emergency evacuation scenario with limited evacuation exit capabi and distribution.