Open Access

ARTICLE

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Safe Crowd Evacuation in Emergencies

Maria Gul¹, Imran Ali Khan¹, Gohar Zaman², Atta Rahman^3,*, Jamaluddin Mir², Sardar Asad Ali Biabani^4,5, May Issa Aldossary⁶, Mustafa Youldash⁷, Ashraf Saadeldeen⁸, Maqsood Mahmud⁹, Asiya Abdus Salam⁶, Dania Alkhulaifi³, Abdullah AlTurkey³

1 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Abbottabad Campus, Abbottabad, 22010, Pakistan
2 Department of Computer Science, Abbottabad University of Science and Technology, Abbottabad, 22010, Pakistan
3 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, P.O. Box 1982, Dammam, 31441, Saudi Arabia
4 Science and Technology Unit, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, 21955, Saudi Arabia
5 Deanship of Scientific Research, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, 21955, Saudi Arabia
6 Department of Computer Information Systems, College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, P.O. Box 1982, Dammam, 31441, Saudi Arabia
7 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, P.O. Box 1982, Dammam, 31441, Saudi Arabia
8 Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Omdurman Islamic University, Omdurman, 14415, Sudan
9 Business Analytic Program, Department of Management and Marketing, College of Business Administration, University of Bahrain, Sakhir, 32038, Bahrain

* Corresponding Author: Atta Rahman. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2024, 79(1), 1631-1657. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2024.048289

Received 03 December 2023; Accepted 13 March 2024; Issue published 25 April 2024

Abstract

Obstacle removal in crowd evacuation is critical to safety and the evacuation system efficiency. Recently, many researchers proposed game theoretic models to avoid and remove obstacles for crowd evacuation. Game theoretical models aim to study and analyze the strategic behaviors of individuals within a crowd and their interactions during the evacuation. Game theoretical models have some limitations in the context of crowd evacuation. These models consider a group of individuals as homogeneous objects with the same goals, involve complex mathematical formulation, and cannot model real-world scenarios such as panic, environmental information, crowds that move dynamically, etc. The proposed work presents a game theoretic model integrating an agent-based model to remove the obstacles from exits. The proposed model considered the parameters named: (1) obstacle size, length, and width, (2) removal time, (3) evacuation time, (4) crowd density, (5) obstacle identification, and (6) route selection. The proposed work conducts various experiments considering different conditions, such as obstacle types, obstacle removal, and several obstacles. Evaluation results show the proposed model’s effectiveness compared with existing literature in reducing the overall evacuation time, cell selection, and obstacle removal. The study is potentially useful for public safety situations such as emergency evacuations during disasters and calamities.

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Keywords

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