Modeling and Research on Multi-Speed Heterogeneous Crowd Evacuation with Asymmetric Competitiveness

In order to investigate the influence of factors such as pheromones and avoidance behavior on the evacuation of heterogeneous crowds, a multi-speed cellular automata evacuation model based on asymmetric competitiveness is proposed for the evacuation of the complex groups in a single-exit room. By optimizing the crowd density and pedestrian speed equations, multi-speed heterogeneous crowds can be obtained in the model. In order to achieve the description of a multi-dimensional asymmetric competitiveness heterogeneous population, the evacuation competitiveness is considered in the pedestrians with different speed, age, gender, etc., and by considering the avoidance character existing among pedestrians, the avoidance behavior is also discussed in this model. It is well known that the information received by different pedestrians is different. In order to consider the asymmetry of information, the pheromones are introduced into the evacuation model to discuss the effect of information differences on evacuation. The evacuation results show that the asymmetry of information has a facilitating effect on the evacuation speed of pedestrians, and the best evacuation effect is obtained when the radius of the pheromone is about 3 m. Moreover, evacuation time is weakly correlated with pedestrians’ gender but strongly correlated with pedestrians’ age. The avoidance behavior plays a positive role in evacuation, and the evacuation time reaches the minimum value when the avoidance probability is about 0.5. The slope of the reduction in evacuation time is greatest when the avoidance threshold is 0.4 to 0.8. The findings can support evacuation capacity assessment, emergency planning, and decision making.