Investigating Crowd Behaviour during Emergency Evacuations Using Agent-Based Modelling

In the present paper we argue that the effectiveness of interventions/design solutions supporting emergency evacuation of crowds in socio-technical systems, depends on the appropriateness of the models used for the crowd behaviour. After reviewing basic approaches already used to model escaping crowds, the knowledge about crowd behaviour provided by modern social psychology is briefly presented. Agent-based modelling is proposed as an adequate bottom-up approach to model a number of psychological crowd effects on individual psychomotor behaviour, which in turn influence crowd behaviour. The basic features of the agent-based model developed for the passengers of a metro on fire are presented as an example of an escaping crowd, to show the merits of the proposed modelling