Fundamental Building Blocks for Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction in Emergency Evacuations

Evacuations requiring large numbers of pedestrians to evacuate and potentially interact with vehicles are unique in the complexity of interactions that must be understood and in the potentially catastrophic consequences of poor management. On the pedestrian side alone, these events, which may result from a variety of causes including terrorist attacks, bomb threats, and building fires, require an understanding of individual and group social dynamics, a wide breadth of mobility levels, cultural tendencies, and many other factors. Past research, involving bimodal interactions, concentrate on intersections or pedestrian midblock crossings in non–emergency scenarios, but only rarely address panic-induced evacuations. Using an agent-based modeling approach, this study serves as a fundamental building block for establishing pedestrian behavior when navigating around vehicles during an evacuation. This model combines survey data with sociological and psychological factors obtained from the literature to capture the heterogeneous decision-making of the pedestrian evacuees. The model will include a range of evacuating agents and focus on the decisions of pedestrians interacting with a few vehicles to explore the basic bimodal dynamics that occur during emergency evacuations. Findings show that implementing diverse characteristics changes the pedestrian response in a panic-induced environment. This model lays the foundation for a fundamentally sound full-scale evacuation model.