Author's Commentary: Time to Leave the Louvre

摘要

Crowd evacuation and response to emergency situations is a relatively new and interesting research field. It is truly an interdisciplinary subject area, sitting at the intersection of mathematics, physics, civil engineering, fire safety engineering, computational science, and human psychology. Conceptually, the process of evacuating a building is relatively simple: safely move individuals from inside of the building to outside. However, the process becomes significantly more intricate as building complexity and occupancy increase. Given a sizable building with a large number of occupants, the challenge to maintain order, ensure individual safety and evacuate as quickly as possible becomes difficult. From a mathematical standpoint, there is an abundance of macroscopic and microscopic evacuation models. These include • network flow models; • discrete microscopic models, such as the social force model, cellular automata model, particle-swarm optimization models, and agent-based models; and • continuous macroscopic models, such as fluid dynamic models and gas-kinetic models [Zhou et al. 2018].