Evolutionary Game of Emergency Evacuation after an Earthquake at a University: How to Promote Orderly Evacuation

Safe and effective evacuation is very important to reduce casualties after earthquakes. Given that evacuation is a checking process rather than a preselection process, evolutionary game theory can be used to better understand the crowd dynamics by analyzing the imitation effects in terms of individual interactions during evacuation. The key purpose of this paper was to construct an evolutionary game model of emergency evacuation of a teaching building at a university after an earthquake to search for the specific constraints necessary to reach the expected collective behaviors for orderly evacuation. We first analyzed the evacuation scenarios, including the environment of the teaching building, emergency degree of the earthquake and behaviors of the crowd. The related game players in the evacuation process were divided into three types, impulsive evacuees, calm evacuees and university staffs, and their payoff matrix was constructed according to the evacuation scenarios. Then, an evolutionary game model via the replicated dynamic system was created, and stable strategies were discussed. Next, we simulated eighteen evacuation scenarios with adjustment of the guiding authoritativeness, emergency degree, and group-oriented coefficient; the simulation results showed that the worst stable strategies can be avoided and the expected stable strategies can be obtained by adjusting the constraints, which are closely related to the corresponding management measures. Finally, the performance of the proposed model was verified by comparisons with the real videos and the conventional strategies. © 2013 IEEE.