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Article
Publication date: 5 June 2017

Muzna Zafar, Kashif Zia, Dinesh Kumar Saini, Arshad Muhammad and Alois Ferscha

It has been witnessed that many incidents of crowd evacuation have resulted in catastrophic results, claiming lives of hundreds of people. Most of these incidents were a result of…

Abstract

Purpose

It has been witnessed that many incidents of crowd evacuation have resulted in catastrophic results, claiming lives of hundreds of people. Most of these incidents were a result of localized herding that eventually turned into global panic. Many crowd evacuation models have been proposed with different aspects of interests. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to bring together many of these aspects to study evacuation dynamics.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed agent-based model, in a hypothetical physical environment, uses perception maps for routing decisions which are constructed from agents’ personal observations of the surroundings as well as information gathered through distant communication. Communication is governed by a trust model which measures the authenticity of the information being shared. Agents are of two types; emotional and rational. The trust model is combined with a game-theoretic model to resolve conflict of agents’ own type with that of types of agents in the neighborhood.

Findings

Evacuation dynamics in different environmental and exit strategies are evaluated on the basis of reduced herding and evacuation time. Using this integrated information sharing model, agents gain an overall view of the environment, sufficient to select the optimal path towards exits with respect to reduced herding and evacuation time.

Originality/value

The proposed model has been formulated and established using an agent-based simulation integrating important modeling aspects. The paper helps in understanding the interplay between technological and humanistic aspects in smart and pervasive environments.

Details

International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, vol. 13 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-7371

Keywords

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