A Novel Kinetic Model to Simulate Evacuation Dynamics

Summary

We present the Kinetic Model (KM) as an alternative to combat the computational barrier posed by state-of-the-art evacuation modeling and simulation approaches. Instead of tracing individual agents, the KM simulates a coarse measure, namely the local occupant density. The two-phased approach tracks two distinct kinds of traffic, namely individual motion in “rarefied” (i.e. non-congested) regions and vacancies left by individual motion in “dense” (i.e. congested) regions. The dynamics of the phase boundary is governed by the balance of individuals moving from the “rarefied” region and vacancies moving from the “dense” regions across the boundary, making the approach intrinsically computationally efficient. The paper presents the theoretical formulation of the KM and comparisons of the model predictions of occupancy during evacuation with that from higher fidelity ABM. The KM computations are nearly 3 orders of magnitude faster than the ABM simulations with minimal degradation of prediction accuracy.