Simulating Panic In Crowds During Evacuations

Abstract: The layout of a room plays an important role in how effectively it can be evacuated. In particular, the locations and number of exits in a room affect how effective an evacuation is. What also affects the effectiveness of evacuations is panic behaviour and injuries. This project uses crowd simulation to simulate room evacuations involving panic behaviour and injuries, and investigates how that would affect the effectiveness of the evacuations, and also how panic would affect the number of injuries. Using models of three different classrooms at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, with three different exit door configurations in each, simulations were performed of evacuations where one to two simulated participants, called agents, were in a panicked state. The panicked agents would move at twice the regular speed and could push other agents, injuring them. Injured agents became stationary obstacles causing other agents to slow down, simulating effort to carefully step over the injured agents. Results of the simulations indicate that panic and injuries increased the evacuation time in all room layouts and exit door configurations, due to injured agents slowing down other agents. Further research is needed, however, possibly with more realistic simulations of panic, to draw more definite conclusions.