Safety Indication Signs-Based Crowd Division and Leader Selection Approach for Evacuation Guidance

The safety indication signs (SISs) are indispensable direction environmental information indicators for crowd evacuation. However, given that pedestrians have different acceptance and understanding of environmental information, the application effect of SISs in evacuation management is still limited. This article proposed a new crowd division and leader selection algorithm based on the leader–follower phenomenon to improve the guiding effect of SISs. The configuration of SIS is similar to the sensing area of sensors. According to the guide role of SISs in evacuation direction and route selection, we divide the crowd into the leaders and followers based on pedestrians’ visual distance and visual field. A modified PRM algorithm is proposed to consider the SISs in path planning. The crowd behavior is decided by a movement-driving approach that combines the reciprocal velocity obstacle (RVO) model and a modified social force model (SFM). The proposed approach can adapt the application of sensors in evacuation management. Several evacuation simulations are conducted to verify the proposed approach in different scenarios and evaluate the results in terms of evacuation efficiency and reasonableness of SISs’ placement. The result illustrates that the approach is appropriate for evacuation guiding in large outdoor scenes or indoor buildings.