Evacuation behaviors at exit in CA model with force essentials: A comparison with social force model

The problem of emergent evacuation is of obvious importance in common life. However, many existing evacuation models are either computationally inefficient, or are missing some crucial human behaviors in crowds. In this paper, we improve a cellular automata (CA) model introduced recently, which quantifies evacuation process with three basic forces, and compare its performance with the social force model introduced by Helbing et al. in an 200-people evacuation of a single-exit square room. The main characteristics compared include arching, clogging and faster-is-slower behaviors, as well as the evacuation time. The results show that the two models are comparable in all calculations, indicating that the three forces, i.e., repulsion, friction and attraction, are basic reasons for complex behaviors emerged from evacuation. Furthermore, because of its simple rules and fast calculation speed, the discussed CA model is easily analyzed and is very helpful to the applications. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.