An evacuation model considering pedestrian group behavior under violent attacks

Abstract

In recent years, violent attacks have garnered significant attention from the international community and gradually evolved into a global issue. In responding to such emergencies, effective emergency evacuation is an essential means to ensure public safety. In order to explore the pedestrian evacuation dynamics in violent attacks and understand the behavioral characteristics of individuals and the dynamic interactions of groups during the evacuation process, this paper proposes an agent-based cellular automata evacuation model. First, each agent is assigned several internal attributes such as life value, panic value, and movement speed, and the assignments fully take into account the heterogeneity of individuals. Next, by setting the attack strategy of attackers and the evacuation mechanism of pedestrians, the complex system is modeled from a microscopic perspective. Finally, the effects of critical factors on the pedestrian evacuation process, such as panic coefficient, crowd structure, group ratio, attack distance and intensity, attacker location and number, and counterattack probability, are discussed through simulation. The results show that the tension caused by moderate panic is beneficial, but excessive panic will lead to increased evacuation time and fatalities. Meanwhile, the group behavior among pedestrians causes them to move relatively lagging, and the evacuation efficiency decreases as the group scale increases. Additionally, increases in attack intensity, attack distance, and attacker number all result in more casualties, and the consequences are most severe when multiple attackers operate separately, but counterattacks by pedestrians can significantly improve the overall safety of evacuation. Our study can provide some reference and basis for emergency management under violent attacks.