Cellular automaton model for social forces interaction in building evacuation for sustainable society

A basic cellular automaton model does not consider social forces interaction in building evacuation thus could not explain complex crowd evacuation processes. This study developed a cellular automaton model on social forces interaction in building evacuation, where the positive and negative impacts of social forces on evacuation time were simulated and analyzed. The model was verified using experimental data. The clustering attraction between people always increased the evacuation time regardless of the number of evacuees, the building size, the number of exits, and the people distribution, thus the clustering attraction is always to be avoided. When people in a room were randomly and evenly distributed, the repulsive force of obstacles, the attractiveness of evacuation direction, and the repulsive force of exit congestion played negligible roles on the evacuation time thus could be ignored. The evacuation path could be optimised by adjusting the influence coefficients of social forces to reduce the evacuation time.