Integrating Cumulative Prospect Theory into a Cellular Automata Model for Building Evacuation with Obstacles

A reliable evacuation model plays an important role in building design, emergency systems, and safety management. The cellular automata (CA) model, widely applied in simulating evacuations, determines evacuees’ movement by probabilities in discrete space and time, and provides evacuees with rational moving decisions. However, people are not always rational. To fill this gap, in this study, cumulative prospect theory (CPT), a realistic decision-making model to describe the subjective outcomes and probabilities, was integrated into the CA model (i.e., CPT-CA) to mimic actual human decision-making behavior during evacuation in a room with obstacles. Two types of evacuation scenarios were used to validate our proposed model: one exit and two exits in the classrooms. The results showed that when the classroom with only one exit, the CPT-CA model can provide a relatively close, realistic evacuation time for building evacuation, while the advantages of this model are diminished when there are two exits. Our proposed CPT-CA model can help architects and engineers to adopt this building evacuation model for their building designs.