Simulation of the kin behavior in building occupant evacuation based on Cellular Automaton

Individual behavior of occupants, which is quite complex, greatly affects the route choice, the evacuation time and the efficiency. The phenomenon of the kin behavior often occurs during evacuation. In this paper, a two-dimensional Cellular Automata model is applied to simulate the process of evacuation with respect to the kin behavior. Many interesting phenomena during real evacuation, such as incoherence, jamming, gathering, backtracking and waiting, are simulated by the variation of the building structure, the occupants' arrangement, the kin attraction and the route selection. We conclude that the psychology of going with the crowd is not always harmful; the conclusions about the kin behavior in one-exit case are the same as those in two-exits case; the number of the sub-groups and the members in each sub-group influence the evacuation efficiency a lot; the typical phenomena of waiting and backtracking in real evacuation do reduce the evacuation efficiency. We have preliminarily found that the proper kin behavior is beneficial to improve the evacuation efficiency.