Evacuation Simulation with Guidance for Anti-disaster Planning

Crowd evacuation simulations are useful tools for analyzing and assessing the safety of building occupants. Agent-based simulations provide a platform for computing individual as well as and collective behaviors in crowds. During an evacuation, it is well known that trained leaders or evacuation guides play a key role in saving human lives. In this paper, we propose an evacuation simulation system where agents are guided by evacuation orders from authorities. The simulations captured typical behaviors observed during crowd evacuation. For example, the total evacuation time was reduced when most of the agents followed the guidance, although the evacuation times of individual agents were different. When a specific agent is involved in the movement of other agents to a different destination, the evacuation takes a longer amount of time. The simulation appears to depict real-life situations well, which shows that simulations can be a useful tool to estimate evacuation situations prior to emergency evacuation drills. keywords: Evacuation, Guidance, Communication