Assessing the Impact of Dynamic Public Signage on Mass Evacuation

Dynamic signage is one main use case for public displays with clear benefits for their target audiences: content (i.e. directions) can be adapted if circumstances change and can be relayed quickly to large numbers of people. This is particularly true in cases where sudden and dangerous events occur, for example a fire or an explosion. In this paper, we analyse the impact that public displays providing dynamic directions can have on large-scale evacuation at a mass event. In order to achieve this, we developed an agent-based model that we applied to a scenario requiring the evacuation of a local football stadium. The results indicate that dynamic signage can speed up evacuation and reduces fatalities in the vast majority of simulated cases.