Effect of pedestrian judgement on evacuation efficiency considering hesitation

In this paper, we propose a modification of cellular automata models by introducing the local density field and the hesitation time cost to study the effect of pedestrian judgement of the environment on evacuation. Some studies have employed the surrounding density to describe the decision-making process, while we believe that the anticipation of pedestrians' moving direction within the visual range has a great impact on evacuation. In addition, the hesitation time cost can be used to illustrate the loss of payoff in the conflict game. Simulation results show that either the presence of too many cooperators or defectors in the evacuation group is not conducive to the safe evacuation. The time cost is the least when the number of cooperators is almost equal to the one of defectors. It is found that heterogeneous pedestrian speeds can improve the evacuation efficiency to a certain extent. The total evacuation time can be reduced if 20% of the pedestrians slow down. Moreover, the vision radius is an essential factor of the evacuation. The evacuation time is the shortest when the radius is about 4 cells. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.