Automatic Guidance Signage Placement Through Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm

Guidance signage placement is a fundamental operation for crowd control in public places. The current methods mainly rely on manual design or mathematical models, which are not flexible and effective enough for crowd control in large public places. To address this issue, this article proposes a multiobjective evolutionary framework that can search for high-quality guidance signage placement strategies automatically. In the proposed method, an agent-based crowd simulation model is proposed to simulate the wayfinding behaviors of pedestrians in public places. Furthermore, a new safety metric is proposed to quantitatively evaluate the quality of guidance signage placement strategies. On this basis, an indicator-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (IBEA) is utilized to search for optimal guidance signage placement strategies that have tradeoffs between crowd safety and pedestrians’ travel time. Simulation experiments on both synthetic and real-world scenes were conducted to evaluate the proposed method, and the simulation results show that the proposed framework can generate very promising guidance signage placement strategies in comparison with several existing methods.