Crowd Evacuation With Multi-Modal Cooperative Guidance in Subway Stations: Computational Experiments and Optimization

Setting up guidance equipment and leaders is widely used as an effective measure to improve the operation and evacuation efficiency of subway stations for the safety of passengers. Cooperation among different kinds of guidance modals can benefit the passenger evacuation process and reduce the operating and management costs as well as the risk of injury to people in subway stations. This article proposes a framework of multimodal cooperative guidance (MMCG) systems for commanding the crowd evacuation in case of emergency, where three types of guidance modes are considered. The bi-level MMCG optimization models are constructed to determine the optimal quantities and initial locations of multimodal guidance. The MMCG schemes are designed by minimizing cost functions taking into account the constraints of the number of guidance, valid coverage, and guiding expectation. An extended social force (SF) model is proposed to study crowd evacuation dynamics with multimodal guidance. The computational experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed cooperative guidance schemes at the subway platform scenario. Three unimodal guidance schemes and a contrasted scheme without guidance are also proposed as comparison schemes. The results show that the crowd evacuation efficiency and the utilization ratio of exits are improved by taking into account the cooperation among different guidance modals.