An Entropy-Based Combined Behavior Model for Crowd Evacuation

Crowd evacuation has gained increasing attention due to its importance in the day-to-day management of public areas. During an emergency evacuation, there are a variety of factors that need to be considered when designing a practical evacuation model. For example, relatives tend to move together or look for each other. These behaviors undoubtedly aggravate the chaos degree of evacuating crowds and make evacuations hard to model. In this paper, we propose an entropy-based combined behavior model to better analyze the influence of these behaviors on the evacuation process. Specifically, we utilize the Boltzmann entropy to quantitatively denote the degree of chaos in the crowd. The evacuation behavior of heterogeneous people is simulated through a series of behavior rules. Moreover, we devise a velocity adjustment method to ensure the evacuees follow a more orderly direction. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed evacuation model and provide useful insights into the design of practical evacuation strategies.