A Game-Theoretic Approach to Safe Crowd Evacuation in Emergencies

Obstacle removal in crowd evacuation is critical to safety and the evacuation system efficiency. Recently, many researchers proposed game theoretic models to avoid and remove obstacles for crowd evacuation. Game theoretical models aim to study and analyze the strategic behaviors of individuals within a crowd and their interactions during the evacuation. Game theoretical models have some limitations in the context of crowd evacuation. These models consider a group of individuals as homogeneous objects with the same goals, involve complex mathematical formulation, and cannot model real-world scenarios such as panic, environmental information, crowds that move dynamically, etc. The proposed work presents a game theoretic model integrating an agent-based model to remove the obstacles from exits. The proposed model considered the parameters named: (1) obstacle size, length, and width, (2) removal time, (3) evacuation time, (4) crowd density, (5) obstacle identification, and (6) route selection. The proposed work conducts various experiments considering different conditions, such as obstacle types, obstacle removal, and several obstacles. Evaluation results show the proposed model’s effectiveness compared with existing literature in reducing the overall evacuation time, cell selection, and obstacle removal. The study is potentially useful for public safety situations such as emergency evacuations during disasters and calamities.