A discrete kinetic model for crowd dynamics in evacuation emergencies.

Crowd dynamics modeling plays a key role in planning and management large-scale gatherings, especially when it comes to improving pedestrian facility design and optimizing evacuation. This work deals with a sensitivity analysis to investigate the impact of domain quality, crowd density, and distribution, size of exits, layout and shape of obstacles, and exit size on evacuation times. Using a discrete kinetic model, pedestrian-pedestrian and pedestrian-environment interactions are taken into account. The framework is parameterized to assess the impact of the factors driving evacuation time in emergency situations, in particular, the position and shape of the obstacles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]