A fine grid cellular automaton model for pedestrian evacuation considering the effect of an obstacle

Abstract

A cellular automaton (CA) model with a finer discretization of space is proposed to simulate a non-emergency evacuation process in a room with an obstacle. During the evacuation process, a triangle “evading region” phenomenon has been observed through simulation and experiment on the upstream side of the spatial obstacle. In this paper, we use a simple method to generate an obstacle floor field corresponding to the triangle. We investigate the relationship between the pedestrian trajectories and the obstacle’s position. We also study the effect of the obstacle on evacuation time and average evacuation speed. Our study provides insights into the simulation of obstacle avoidance behavior of pedestrians in simple scenarios.