Game theory model of exit selection in pedestrian evacuation considering visual range and choice firmness*

Abstract

Exit choice is one of the most important pedestrian behaviors during evacuation. Distance to the exit is a generally recognized factor influencing expected moving time to the exit. Visual range determines how much information a pedestrian can perceive, thus the number of pedestrians within the visual field can be used to estimate waiting time at the exit. Besides, the choice firmness that reflects the degree to which a pedestrian would persist in his/her previous choice of exit is proposed. By integrating game theory into a cellular automata simulation framework, the pedestrian exit choice mechanism is investigated and explicitly modeled in this paper. A systematic analysis of the key factors influencing pedestrian evacuation is conducted, including visual radius and choice firmness of a pedestrian, initial crowd distribution of the room, exit layout as well as exit width. It is found that low choice firmness level can lead to unnatural pedestrian behavior such as wandering, which is adverse to evacuation. The longer the pedestrian’s visual radius, the earlier the pedestrian can determine his/her final selection of the exit. Compared with the scenario where the pedestrians are randomly distributed, pedestrians clustered together in a corner of the room lead to high crowd density and imbalanced use of exits. Furthermore, the exit layout and exit width also have a certain influence on pedestrian evacuation process. The results of this paper may be of benefit to the formulation of behavioral rules in other pedestrian simulation models.