Behavior-based cellular automaton model for pedestrian dynamics

Pedestrian evacuation is one open question in a myriad of scientific disciplines and has attracted considerable attention during the past decades. Aim to issue, various research approaches, such as mathematical modeling and simulation, experimental studied and socio-psychology surveys, have been extensively employed. Different from previous frameworks, here a behavior-based cellular automaton model is proposed, which involves the environmental characteristics and neighbors’ behaviors. Given the certain range of degree of emergency, it is shown that enhancing the degree of emergency will shorten evacuation time yet decrease cooperation enthusiasm. The larger the degree of familiarity is, the shorter the evacuation time will be. In variance, larger the dependence of pedestrians will prolong the evacuation time. Besides, the novel model also produces some interesting self-organization phenomena, such as the collective behavior at the beginning of the evacuation and arch-like blocking at the end of the evacuation. When our model is finally applied to the evacuation scenario where a room has two symmetrically located exits, the symmetry breaking effect takes place. Our model may shed new light to the study of pedestrian dynamics in realistic world.