Airport evacuation under panic conditions: a microsimulation modeling applied at Ottawa International Airport

This study develops a framework of pedestrian evacuation microsimulation modeling that considers pedestrians’ social-physiological behavior in assessing an airport evacuation. The study implements social force model within a simulation platform enabling the articulation of stochastic pedestrian walking behavior realistically and reliably. It performs a sensitivity analysis of pedestrian behavior parameters to identify the candidate parameters required to capture pedestrian behavior under different levels of panic conditions. The study considers the case study of the Ottawa International Airport and tests and evaluates contrasting evacuation scenarios under low panic, medium panic, and high panic situations. Results indicate that under the low panic evacuation scenario, the pedestrians yield their movements with an increase in network bottleneck, potentially exhibit cooperative behavior, and control their speed with the rise of crowd density. On the contrary, individuals in high panic evacuation scenarios exhibit aggressive behavior indicated by their average speed, which is approximately 1.15 and 3.5 times the average compared with medium panic and low panic evacuation scenarios, respectively. Results suggest that it takes 5.38 min to evacuate 1300 passengers under high panic conditions compared with 9.75 min for a low panic evacuation scenario. However, in the case of a high panic evacuation scenario, the average speed keeps increasing even with the increase in crowd density. This framework can develop and evaluate strategies for safely evacuating the airport in the case of an emergency.