A Survival Guide during Fire Outbreak inside a Cinema

Hsin-Huei Cheng

Instructor : Demetri Terzopoulos

University of California at Los Angeles

Abstract

A crowd behavior simulation is performed in a situation where fire outbreak occurs inside a cinema. Each
individual agent inside the simulation will decide their own escape pathways based on their local
perception of the environments (i.e., agents and obstacles). It is found that agents who do not interact with
their local environment (i.e. people that are stayed clam) will escape more efficiently than those who
interact with other agents. This model allows for the dynamic simulation of different crowd behaviors in
emergent situations, which will be useful for survival guide design.

1. Introduction

“Oh My God! There’s a fire!”. Imagine when you are
inside a cinema watching a famous movie, but
suddenly the fire alarm rings, what would you do?
Would you cry, run or wait to get rescued? Everyone
behaves differently in facing an emergency situation.
People’s reactions ultimately influence the overall
human survival rate in the incident. In the occasion of
fire outbreak in an enclosed area, people were found
killed by stepping on each other, instead of being killed
by the fire. Many human and environmental factors are
coupled together that will affect the final outcomes.
The most critical factor is the personality of
individuals. Other factors like the environment, the
physical health situation, the time of making decision,
and crowd’s behavior etc. also play important roles.
In this project, I simulate the real time dynamics of
people movement inside a cinema in response to a fire
alarm. Each person is an autonomous agent. They can
interact with each others, as well as the static obstacles
inside the cinema. The agents make decision for their
local pathways, and this information is collected in a
central decision maker at each time step to implement
the agents’ motion. In particular, each agent was
randomly assigned with different properties in order to
simulate different crowd behaviors.
This paper is organized as follow. The design of a
virtual environment model is discussed in Section 2.
In addition, the details of the autonomous model and
the different variations will be presented in Section 3.
The implementation methods will be discussed in
Section 4, followed by results and discussions in
Section 5. Finally, the conclusions and the future work
will be provided in Section 6.
2. Virtual Environmental Model
In real life, people interact with local their
environments in deciding the escaping pathway.
Similarly, in the simulation, each agent interacts with
their local environment in order to decide the best
escaping route. Therefore, the design of the virtual
environment is crucial for the correct implementation
of the simulation.
To begin with, the virtual cinema environment will
be briefly introduced. The plain view of the cinema
layout is shown in Figure 1. As shown in the figure,
the grids in pink color represent the exits. Each agent
selects the nearest exit at each time step, which is
determined by the Euclidean distance between the exit
and the agent. The seats are illustrated in blue girds.
These seats are stationary obstacles, where agents can
only go around the obstacles instead of walking across
them.
The virtual environment model consists of a
stationary map, a mobile map, and a path map (Figure
2). The stationary map records the grid locations
where the obstacles (i.e. seats) occupy. This map is
stationary with respect to time. For dynamic moving
agents, the mobile map stores the information for
occupied cells in real time. Agents that are within
specific cell are recorded in the “occupied agent list”.
The dynamic map is updated at each time step. Both
stationary and mobile maps are necessary input
information for the central decision maker to
implement the paths. The implementation will be
stored in the path map.
Figure 1. The plain view of cinema.
Figure 2. Upper left: stationary map; upper right:
mobile map; lower: path map
3. Autonomous Agent Behavior
The dynamic agents are the major character in the
simulation. Here, I will first introduce the properties
of the agents and then describe the behavior models
based on these properties.
3.1 Autonomous Model
The agents were represented by circular-shaped
objects in the simulation. Agents with different
properties are represented with different colors. The
properties of the agents are summarized as follow:
- Physical factors: different walking speeds
represent different physical conditions
- Mental factors: selfishness and helpfulness
- Group factor: belongs to a group or alone
Each agent possesses three different states. The initial
state is indicated as “sitting” state. When the agents
are alerted by the fire alarm, their states change from
the “sitting” state to the “running” state. After a
defined time period, if the agents are trapped inside
the cinema, then their states will turn into the “dead”
state, which implies that the agents are killed by the
fire. For those who have successfully reached the
exits, their states will turn into “alive” states. A
summary of state changes is illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3. State change of an agent
3.2 Autonomous Behavior Model
The general behavior of agents can be classified as
below (Figure 4).
A. helpful agents meet helpful agents: the slower
agent has the priority to move to the next grid
B. selfish agents meet helpful agents: selfish
ones have the priority to move to the next grid
C. selfish agents meet selfish agents: one of them
will be given the priority to move
D. group members meet other individuals: group
members have the higher priority if the group
is already in the process of moving. Group
members cannot be separated.

(a) (b) (c) (d)
Figure 4. (a) H1 has lower moving speed so it has the
priority to move. (b) S1 has the priority to move. (c)
Either S1 or S2 has the priority. (d) G1 has the priority
to move if one of the group members (e.g. G0) first
passed by the grid
3.3 Sensing Area
In reality, people can only sense their local
environment to make a decision. In the virtual
environment, each agent is provided with the ability to
sense its local neighborhood, in order to decide the
best moving direction. For instance, if the number of
neighbors of an agent is less than that of its right hand
side, the agent will choose the direction where there
are fewer neighbors (i.e. higher chance to escape
faster). With this concept of neighborhood sensing,
each agent updates a sensing list which records the
occupied cells within a specified area of interest at
each time step. An example of the sensing area is
shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. The 2 tier sensing area of agent p. The light
blue area represents the 1st tier, whereas the dark blue
region represents the 2nd tier.
4. Method Description
An outline of the methodology used for computing a
path for an agent is provided in Figure 6. The function
“predictNext” is to find the optimal intermediate
positions (i.e. sub-goals) toward the final goal. The
function refers to the stationary map, as well as the 2-
tier sensing list to find the next direction that has a
higher escape probability. The output of this function
is the next moving position of each agent at next time
step.
Since all the agents movements have to be
coordinated at the same time, a path decision maker is
required to coordinate the movement. This is achieved
by the function “confirmPath”. For each grid on the
path map, “confirmPath” checks the occupied status.
There are some complicated rules for the
implementation, which are outlined as follow:
A. A grid can only be occupied by one agent p
and “confirmPath” approves p’s next moving
position if
- p does not belong to any group
- p belongs to a moving group and the previous
member just walked through the grid
- p belongs to a group and is the leader of the
group
B. in the situation where the grid is going to be
occupied by more than one agent
- compare each candidate’s properties and
follow the rules described in Section 4.2 to
find the “winner” who can occupy the
grid at the next time step. The agents who are
“lost” in the comparison will remain at the
same position.
Following the method, agents can progressively reach
the nearest goal (i.e., the exit).
Figure 6. The pseudo codes of the method.
5. Results and Discussion
In this section, I will illustrate some agent behaviors
based on the behavior model mentioned in Section
4.2. These demonstrations are displayed on the
websites at
http://web.me.com/stella0107/stella/CS275_AL.html.
Different crowd behaviors were simulated based on
different agents’ properties and some interesting
phenomena were observed. For instance, Demo 3 and
4 demonstrate a situation where agents located on the
left hand side of the cinema do not interact with other
agents, therefore they escape to the exit based on the
shortest pathway; while agents located on the right
side are programmed to interact with other agents,
therefore a longer decision making process is required
for individual agent to execute their pathway. This is
reflected from the simulated behavior model, where
some agents become hesitate to decide which way to
go. They interact with the dynamic environment in
real time and cannot find a good solution immediately.
When people meet an emergency, they often become
too afraid or anxious to make quick and reasonable
decision.
In this project, I did not perform some of the
interesting features that would make the simulation
more realistic, such as collision avoidance and global
path planning. In addition, one problem I want to
address is the grid based data structure. The grid size I
used for the stationary, the mobile, and the path maps
are all the same to make the computation easier and
faster. However, this leaded to a situation where some
agents will get stuck on the boundary of the grid
without further movement. Owing to this limitation,
the statistics of the crowd behaviors were not carried
out.
6. Conclusion and Future Work
Crowd behavior simulation is a very interesting topic,
especially when the simulation is coupled with the
complex personalities of individual agents. In this
project, I have demonstrated a crowd behavior model
based on individual agents’ properties, where some
interesting observations were found. Changing the
behavior models will lead to different outcomes that
may be outside our imagination. The results presented
in this report are instructive to educate people how to
escape efficiently from an emergency situation, such
as fire outbreak inside a cinema.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Terzopoulos’s lectures that
let me understand the beauty of Artificial Life. I
would also like to thank the instructor Prof.
Terzopoulos, as well as all the people who were
involved in the development of the simulator for
CS174/274C. Special thanks to Professor Faloutsos
and the teaching assistant Gabriele Nataneli.
References
[1] “Composite Agents”, Hengchin Yeh, Sean Curtis,
Sachin Patil, Jur van den Berg,Dinesh Manocha,
Ming Lin, SCA2008.
[2] "Environmental Modeling for Autonomous
Virtual Pedestrians," W. Shao, D. Terzopoulos,
SAE 2005 Transactions Journal of Passenger
Cars: Electronic and Electrical Systems, 114(7),
February, 2006, 735–742. Compilation of the
most outstanding SAE technical papers of 2005.
[3] "Artificial fishes: Physics, locomotion, perception,
behavior," X. Tu, D. Terzopoulos, Proc. ACM
SIGGRAPH'94 Conference, Orlando, FL, July,
1994, in Computer Graphics Proceedings, Annual
Conference Series, 1994, 43–50.
[4] "Artificial life for computer graphics," D.
Terzopoulos, Communications of the ACM,
42(8), August, 1999, 32–42.
[5] “Steering Behaviors For Autonomous
Characters”, Craig W. Reynolds, Sony Computer
Entertainment America.

Future work includes the optimization of the data

structures, as well as the behavior models. The project
is a small-scale simulation model with a few agents at
the moment. The ultimate goal is to design a large-
scale simulation that can realistically simulate the real
life situation.