Simulating Behaviours to Face up an Emergency Evacuation

Abstract

Computer based models describing pedestrian behavior in an emergency evacuation play a vital role in the development of active strategies that minimize the evacuation time when a closed area must be evacuated. The reference model has a hybrid structure where the dynamics of fire and smoke propagation are modeled by means of Cellular Automata and for simulating people's behavior we are using Intelligent Agents. The model consists of two sub-models, called environmental and pedestrian ones. As part of the pedestrian model, this paper concentrates in a methodology that is able to model some of the frequently observed human?s behaviors in evacuation exercises. Each agent will perceive what is happening around, select the options that exist in that context and then it makes a decision that will reflect its ability to cope with an emergency evacuation, called in this work, behavior. We also developed simple exercises where the model is applied to the simulation of an evacuation due to a potential hazard, such as fire, smoke or some kind of collapse.