Crowd Evacuation Guidance Based on Combined Action Reinforcement Learning

• Published in: Algorithms Vol. 14; no. 1; p. 26
• Main Authors: Xue, Yiran, Wu, Rui, Liu, Jiafeng, Tang, Xianglong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.01.2021
• Subjects: Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Buildings; Complexity; Computer & video games; crowd simulation; Deep learning; deep Q network; Disasters; Efficiency; evacuation guidance; Evacuation systems; Guidance systems; Human error; Learning; Methods; Neural networks; Path planning; reinforcement learning; Researchers; Signs; Simulation; Workloads
• ISSN: 1999-4893; 1999-4893
• DOI: 10.3390/a14010026

Existing crowd evacuation guidance systems require the manual design of models and input parameters, incurring a significant workload and a potential for errors. This paper proposed an end-to-end intelligent evacuation guidance method based on deep reinforcement learning, and designed an interactive simulation environment based on the social force model. The agent could automatically learn a scene model and path planning strategy with only scene images as input, and directly output dynamic signage information. Aiming to solve the “dimension disaster” phenomenon of the deep Q network (DQN) algorithm in crowd evacuation, this paper proposed a combined action-space DQN (CA-DQN) algorithm that grouped Q network output layer nodes according to action dimensions, which significantly reduced the network complexity and improved system practicality in complex scenes. In this paper, the evacuation guidance system is defined as a reinforcement learning agent and implemented by the CA-DQN method, which provides a novel approach for the evacuation guidance problem. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the static guidance method, and on par with the manually designed model method.