Optimal Design of Obstacles in Emergency Evacuation Using an Arch Formation Based Fitness Function

• Published in: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Vol. 917; pp. 129 - 145
• Main Authors: Li, Liang, Liu, Hong, Han, Yanbin
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer 2019; Springer Singapore
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Arch formation; Crowd congestion; Evacuation simulation; Particle swarm optimization
• ISBN: 9789811330438; 9811330433
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-3044-5_10

Congestion in pedestrian crowds is a critical issue for evacuation management and it is possible to alleviate crowd congestion by appropriately placing obstacles in the evacuation scene. To alleviate the crowd congestion by suitably placing obstacles, it is important to extract the characteristics of the evacuation process to improve the evacuation efficiency. In this paper, an arch formation based obstacle optimization approach is firstly employed to get the suitable characteristics of obstacles in a evacuation scene. Concretely, the arch formation in a dense crowd is used to guide the crowd congestion alleviation. The radial pressure, which can represent the strength of arch formation, is used to build a new fitness function for the PSO. The proposed approach can guide the design of pedestrian facilities to achieve a better management of evacuation. In this paper, the effectiveness, and quality of the proposed approach are validated through analysis and simulations.