Development of an evacuation route planning simulation tool for Philippine Science High School – Main Campus using cellular automata crowd modeling

Abstract

Evacuation pathways need to be fast and short to minimize the time of exposure to potential hazards, but determining those that are optimal require accounting for the interactions between evacuees and their environment. Crowd modeling is used as an alternative to finding optimal pathways without doing costly and intensive real-life evacuation simulations. In this work, we develop a simulation tool that uses crowd modeling through Cellular Automata in an evacuation environment based on deterministic movement rules. Using Philippine Science High School – Main Campus as the simulation location, agents in the model use local information to reach designated exits towards safe zones. The tool's usefulness is then tested by analyzing the time taken for complete evacuation and the average distance traveled by all agents in different starting partition plans of the building to be evacuated.