Modeling pedestrian flow accounting for collision avoidance during evacuation

Collision avoidance behavior has become an open challenging problem since it is one of critical factors that influence the pedestrian flow dynamics. In this paper, a cellular automaton (CA) model is developed to depict the pedestrian movements when collision avoidance behaviors exist during evacuation. Then, we utilize the proposed model to simulate the influences of the collision avoidance on the pedestrian movements during the evacuation in a classroom with two exits. The numerical results indicate that more collision avoidance behaviors have negative influences on the evacuation efficiency, and that more competition behaviors generate more collisions while have no prominent positive impacts on the evacuation efficiency. Moreover, the evacuation time increases with the decreasing number of aisles in the classroom and the number of collisions increases with the increasing number of parts in the classroom divided by aisles. The above results are helpful to develop effective evacuation strategies and design the internal layouts of buildings.