Floor Field Model Based on Cellular Automata for Simulating Indoor Pedestrian Evacuation

Abstract

A new static floor field method for simulations of evacuation processes based on cellular automaton was presented in this paper. This model applies an inertia static floor field approach to describe the interaction between the pedestrians and the cell. Here we study a rather simple situation and a complex scenario. We simulate and reproduce Seyfried’s field experiments at the Research Centre Jülich and use its empirical data to validate our model. The concept of scenario-familiarity of the crowd has been proposed to explain the model. It is shown that the variation of the model parameters deeply impacts the evacuation efficiency. The relation between minimal evacuation times and the knowledge of the exit that the pedestrian acknowledges is discussed.