Pedestrian dynamics with explicit sharing of exit choice during egress through a long corridor

The egress literature abounds with studies and models of emergency pedestrian evacuation behavior. Each model tries to incorporate more details and features of the crowd movement dynamics to improve its accuracy. This paper combines a relatively simple pedestrian motion model with a position dependent Voter model to study the effects of opinion sharing on crowd evacuation characteristics. Effect of the presence of leaders on the final outcome of the evacuation is studied in detail. An analytical solution for a simplified version of the egress dynamics with opinion exchange is presented, followed by a set of numerical simulations. Interesting findings about the effect of the strength of interaction between individuals, number and distribution of leaders and initial bias of the evacuees on the final distribution of evacuees over available exits, mean number of steps to evacuate, etc. are presented.