An Optimal Transport-Based Approach for Crowd Evacuation

The effectiveness of crowd evacuation is an important public safety issue. Crowd related incidents are frequent and often result in serious material and human loss, hence the increasing interest in developing new techniques to assist in crowd evacuation. In this paper, we introduce a new crowd evacuation method, where the evacuation plan is computed based on optimal transport. The use of the optimal transport formulation results in the minimization of the kinetic energy necessary to perform the evacuation, thus reducing the effort exercised by the crowd members. To ensure the safety and the feasibility of the computed plan, a safety model is introduced as an additional factor in the optimization. The proposed model allows avoiding dangerous places, spreading out the crowd, limiting the crowd density and imposing one-way circulation. A numerical method adapted to the resulting optimization problem is presented. The efficiency of the proposed approach is evaluated through simulation. The experimental results show that the proposed method computes a solution that strikes a balance between the different considered factors.