Simulating Crowd Evacuation with a Leader-Follower Model

Emergency situations involving a large number of people may develop into disasters. One example of such emergency situation is fire evacuation in a building or crowded area. Although crowd evacuation simulation has been an active research area for many years, little research focuses on simulating the evacuation process with a Leader-Follower Model which shows the role of leaders in the evacuation. In this paper, we have simulated crowd evacuation process from a dancing hall. A crowd includes several groups with each group having a leader and some followers guided by the leader. Leaders are responsible for finding the evacuation path for their followers. The objective of this simulation is to show the effect of different number of leaders on the efficiency of evacuation. A dynamic grouping algorithm based on A* Algorithm has been proposed to simulate the dynamic grouping phenomena with a number of leaders. A prototype system has also been developed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.