A cellular automata evacuation model considering friction and repulsion

There exist interactions among pedestrians and between pedestrian and environment in evacuation. These interactions include attraction, repulsion and friction that play key roles in human evacuation behaviors, speed and efficiency. Most former evacuation models focus on the attraction force, while repulsion and friction are not well modeled. As a kind of multi-particle self-driven model, the social force model introduced in recent years can represent those three forces but with low simulation efficiency because it is a continuous model with complex rules. Discrete models such as the cellular automata model and the lattice gas model have simple rules and high simulation efficiency, but are not quite suitable for interactions’ simulation. In this paper, a new cellular automata model based on traditional models is introduced in which repulsion and friction are modeled quantitatively. It is indicated that the model can simulate some basic behaviors, e.g. arching and the “faster-is-slower” phenomenon, in evacuation as multi-particle self-driven models, but with high efficiency as the normal cellular automata model and the lattice gas model.