Simulation of competitive and cooperative egress movements on the crowd emergency evacuation

Empirical evidence suggests that evacuees tend to break down their well-coordinated motion and adopt competitive egress behaviour when they are confronting life-endangering situations (e.g., fire accident, earthquake). This phenomenon significantly influences crowd dynamics, and subsequently, the overall evacuation time. In this paper, a novel evacuation model has been developed, which takes the detailed cooperative and competitive egress movements of evacuees into consideration. The proposed model has been conducted to simulate crowd (i.e., with different proportion of competitive individuals within the crowd) evacuating from a single-exit compartment room (i.e., the exit width varies from 0.8 to 2.0m). Simulation results show that competitive evacuees exhibit an arc-shape formation in front of the bottleneck area (i.e., the exit). This is notably distinct from the cooperative evacuees generated shape formation. In addition, the evacuation performance (i.e., evacuation time, trajectories, density and flow rate) of competitive and cooperative evacuees over time are successfully captured for analysis. This study contributes to a better understanding of the crowd evacuation dynamics by considering the impact of competitive and cooperative egress movements.