Project Report for "Modelling and Simulating Social Systems with MATLAB"

People tend to form a crowd in states of emergency. The typical flight behaviour is moving away from the source of danger. In open space people would diffuse in all directions but if there are boundaries like walls or a street the only way out is an exit. Usually, exits are small in comparison to the crowd so the flow of people through the exit will be larger than the exit’s capacity. The result manifests itself as a bottleneck. The typical appearance of a bottleneck is a semi-circular crowd around the exit. The main objective of every evacuation plan is a sufficient amount of exits which are well distributed so that the crowd splits up in smaller crowds. The interesting point here is that the crowd will not spread evenly because of the individual and collective behaviour of human beings. People tend to head towards known and visible exits which aren’t crowded. This preference for a specific exit may change depending on the circumstances. Our simulation is focused on how people chose an exit and how this decision affects the collective behaviour.