Evacuation by leader-follower model with bounded confidence and predictive mechanisms

Abstract

This paper studies an evacuation problem described by a leader-follower model with bounded confidence under predictive mechanisms. We design a control strategy in such a way that agents are guided by a leader, which follows the evacuation path. The proposed evacuation algorithm is based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) that uses the current and the past information of the system to predict future agents’ behaviors. It can be observed that, with MPC method, the leader-following consensus is obtained faster in comparison to the conventional optimal control technique. The effectiveness of the developed MPC evacuation algorithm with respect to different parameters and different time domains is illustrated by numerical examples.