Emergency Crowd Evacuation Modeling and Simulation Framework With Cellular Discrete Event Systems

"First responders and security personnel face many challenges to safely evacuate crowded environments. Conducting frequent physical and table-top exercises are neither feasible nor economical. This is where modeling and simulation comes into play in providing a risk-free and economical method to practice various evacuation strategies, train first responders, and provide accurate decision-support and emergency guidance. With the aid of formal methods, here we present a suite of various egress strategies build on top of an open-source modeling and simulation environment. We use Cellular Discrete-Event System Specification (Cell-DEVS) formalism to explore emergency evacuation scenarios by building 12 egress models representing aspects of human behaviors under emergencies and the activities of authorities in guiding the crowd."--From the article.