Grouping behaviour in AmI-enabled crowd evacuation

Grouping behaviour occurs often in crowd evacuation. On the one hand, groups are needed for efficient evacuation. On the other hand, large uncontrolled groups (herds) may cause clogging and increase panic. The mechanisms of emergence of leaders and groups in complex socio-technical systems with intelligent technical components are not well understood. This paper presents the first attempt to unveil the role of AmI technology in formation of spontaneous groups in crowd evacuation. To this end several hypotheses were formulated, which were tested by simulation experiments based on a cognitive agent model. The checking of the hypotheses was done in the context of a train station evacuation scenario. The general outcome is that in a system with scarce and uncertain information, AmI technology can be used to stimulate emergence of leaders and groups to increase the efficiency of evacuation. Furthermore, a large penetration rate of ambient devices may be unnecessary and even not appropriate for fluent evacuation.