The Simulation Research On Coalmine Emergency Evacuation Of The Virtual Crowd Based On Multi-agent

Currently, virtual crowd technology has been widely used in the emergentevacuation simulation in the field of public safety, such as high-rise building, largestadium and subway. However, due to the special circumstances in underground coalmine,the existing researches on virtual crowd emergency evacuation simulation for coalmineaccidents are still very limited. Investigations on coalmine safety behavior show thatsystematically studying miner’s emergency evacuation behaviors in coalmine fire, gasexplosion and other typical accidents and further establishing an effective emergencyevacuation simulation model, not only have practical guidance meaning for developingeffective emergency response plan for underground accidents, but also have veryimportant significance for improving the training level of underground miners. However,traditional experimental method of system safety engineering is costly and quitedangerous.In this paper, combining the existing virtual crowd simulation technology and theactual coalmine emergency evacuation environment, we investigated the virtual crowdsimulation method of underground coal mine emergency evacuation based on multi-agent.Focusing on the psychological and physical characteristics of different roles duringcoalmine emergency evacuation, we built the emergency evacuation decision-makingmodel of different role virtual miners. Moreover, we developed the virtual crowdemergency evacuation algorithm and the virtual reality system for emergency evacuationsimulation of typical underground accidents. This study is not only in favor of in-depthunderstanding the emergency evacuation behaviors of miners and their organization toprovide a theoretical and technical support for developing more practical mine emergencyevacuation plans and training programs for underground miners, but also is helpful toimprove the specific applications of current virtual crowd simulation technology. Themain contents and results include:Firstly, according to the special environment of emergency evacuation inunderground coalmine, virtual crowd simulation model of underground emergencyevacuation was constructed based on multi-agent technology. The presented modelconsists of a virtual crowd simulation module, geometrical scene simulation module, thescene database module, human-computer interaction module and event logging module. At the same time, the behavioral characteristics of human crowd in coalmine emergencyevacuation were investigated and a role-based virtual crowd simulation algorithm wasdeveloped to simulate the leader-follower behaviors in underground emergencyevacuation. In addition, design methods of typical agents were studied. The autonomousvirtual miner agent and the environment/equipment agent were developed.Secondly, virtual crowd path planning algorithm for underground coalmineemergency evacuation was studied. We established virtual mine grid model and achievedvirtual crowd escape path selection approach based on typical A*algorithm. According tothe difficulty degree of different tunnels and the height information of obstacles, weestablished potential energy based heuristic search function for A*path planning to makethe results more suitable for underground coalmine real situation.Thirdly, typical collision detection algorithms in virtual environments were studied.Based on AABB bounding box model, we realized virtual mine collision detection. Onthis basis, we focused on virtual crowd collision avoidance in coalmine emergencyevacuation and designed the collision avoidance strategies and algorithms for virtualcrowd typical movements in coalmine emergency evacuation.Finally, we designed and developed a virtual crowd simulation system forunderground coalmine emergency evacuation simulation, which can realize virtualroaming in underground coalmine and virtual crowd simulation of typical accidents.Specifically, we introduced virtual crowd simulation methods with coalmine fire cases.Moreover, according to the crowd scenes including the different roles, we simulatedemergency evacuation process and actual results to preliminarily verify the relevantmodels and methods presented in this paper.