A Spatio-Temporal Cognitive Framework for Individual Route Choice in Outdoor Evacuation Scenarios

Route choice is a complex issue in simulating individual behaviors and reproducing collective phenomena during evacuations. A growing concern has been given to the individual cognitive mechanism to investigate how routing decisions are made in specific situations. However, the essential role of multiple spatio-temporal scales has not been completely considered in the current cognitive frameworks, which leads to the inaccuracy of cognition representation in evacuation decisions. This study proposes a novel spatio-temporal cognitive framework integrated with multiple spatio-temporal scales for individual route choice. First, a complete spatio-temporal cognitive mechanism is constructed to depict the individual evacuation cognition process. Second, a spatio-temporal route choice strategy that emerges from agent-based simulation and extends into the spatio-temporal potential field is designed to represent the overall time-varying cost along routes in individual subjective estimation. Finally, a spatio-temporal A* algorithm is developed for individual optimal route planning in complex outdoor evacuation scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperformed the conventional potential field model in evacuation performance, in both objective crowd evacuation evaluation metrics and individual subjectively estimated evacuation cost in cognition, and may provide more insights on crowd evacuation management and guidance.