PSO-based evacuation simulation framework

Evacuation simulation is a critical and important research issue for people to design safer building layouts or plan more effective evacuation routes. Many studies adopted methodologies in evolutionary computation into the evacuation simulation systems for finding better solutions. To simulate human behavior or crowd motion is one key factor to the practicality of the system. Particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO), which is originated from the inspiration of bird flocking, is commonly applied to model human behavior. Based on the PSO-based human behavior simulation, many studies have got good results on evacuation simulation. However, the configurations of describing the experiment environment in the literature are complicated and specialized for certain specific scenarios. Observing the fact, we propose a new PSO-based simulation framework in order to provide a simple and general way to configure various simulation scenarios. This work adopts our previously proposed PSO-based crowd movement controlling mechanism and introduces new mechanisms to make the simulation fitting into evacuation circumstance more real. In the proposed framework, all people, obstacles, exits, and even the evacuation guide indicators are modeled as the original component of the PSO algorithm. It is convenient to setup the simulation environment upon the framework. Therefore, taking the proposed work as a research tool will be advantageous when the issue of evacuation simulation is investigated.