Simulating Collective Evacuations with Social Elements

This work proposes an agent-based evacuation model that incorporates social aspects in the behaviour of the agents and validates it on a benchmark. It aims to fill the gap in this research field with mainly evacuation models without psychological and social factors such as group decision making and other social interactions. The model was compared with the previous model, its new social features were analysed and the model was validated. With the inclusion of social aspects, new patterns emerge organically from the behaviour of each agent as showed in the experiments. Notably, people travelling in groups instead of alone seem to reduce evacuation time and helping behaviour is not too costly for the evacuation time as expected. The model was validated with data from a real scenario and demonstrates acceptable results and the potential to be used in predicting real emergency scenarios. This model will be used by emergency management professionals in emergency prevention.