Human Behavior During Emergency Evacuation: Cell Transmission Model

This paper presents an extended cell transmission model to simulate an emergency evacuation of crowd in a supermarket scenario. The supermarket scenario with a daily shopping, an emergency exit and multiple parallel shelves is discretized into a set of regular hexagonal cells. First, we verify the validity of the model by comparing the results of the model with actual data obtained from a reported pedestrian evacuation experiment. To improve the realism of the simulation, we then include three characteristics of human behavior, the unadventurous effect, inertial effect, and panic psychology, in the model as parameters and apply the extended model to the supermarket scenario. By analyzing the pedestrian density distribution, fundamental diagrams, route choice, and total evacuation time, we determine that the parameters have a significant influence on the evacuation process. By establishing a minimization model, we confirm that the total evacuation time is the least when the pedestrians' familiarity with the emergency exit is close to the ratio of the width of the emergency exit to the total width of the two exits. Moreover, by comparing two different methods to choose exits, we can conclude that the approach, by which all pedestrians choose the closer exit, is not always the most efficient evacuation strategy. This study is conducive to devise evacuation plans and design exit layouts in facilities similar to supermarkets.