Competitive egress behaviour: a fuzzy logic-inspired microscopic model

Some recent tragic events in overcrowded situations, as well as the terrorist threat, have highlighted the importance of the availability of good models for pedestrian behaviour under emergency conditions. Existing approaches to crowd models are generally macroscopic or microscopic. In the first case, the crowd is considered to be like a fluid, so that its movement can be described through differential equations. In the second case, the collective behaviour of the crowd is the result of interactions among individual elements of the system. In this paper, we propose a microscopic model of crowd evacuation that incorporates the fuzzy perception and anxiety embedded in human reasoning. The outcomes of the model application, compared to those obtained by other existing models, seem to be quite satisfactory.