Ricerc@Sapienza

We present modeling strategies that describe the motion and interaction of groups of pedestrians in obscured spaces.We start off with an approach based on balance equations in terms of measures and then we exploit the descriptive power of a probabilistic cellular automaton model. Based on a variation of the simple symmetric random walk on the square lattice, we test the interplay between population size and an interpersonal attraction parameter for the evacuation of confined and darkened spaces.

We study the pedestrian escape from an obscure room using a lattice gas model with two species of particles. One species, called passive, performs a symmetric random walk on the lattice, whereas the second species, called active, is subject to a drift guiding the particles towards the exit. The drift mimics the awareness of some pedestrians of the geometry of the room and of the location of the exit.