Optimal leader-follower control for crowd evacuation

Crowd evacuation has become a primary safety issue in many public places in a metropolitan area. Experts from different fields have worked on modeling and designing evacuating policies by using different tools and methods. In this paper, an optimal control approach is used to derive guiding strategies for the rescue agents under different circumstances. Various optimal control problems are formulated to handle different assumptions of the scenario. Both the analytic solutions and the numerical simulation confirm the efficiency of this approach, which in turn can be potentially used as decision-making support in practical applications.