# Emergency Planning for UAV-Controlled Crowd Evacuations
###### Abstract  
One of the most challenging problems during disasters involving crowds is pedestrian evacuation. It is very important in such situations to improve survival rates by getting all or most of the people out in the shortest possible time. Technological intervention through augmenting the evacuation process using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) exhibits great potential in improving survival rates, but the exploration of this method is still in its infancy. Therefore, this study explores the potential of utilizing UAVs for crowd management during emergency evacuations. We conducted a rigorous study, using a simulation model featuring four UAVs and differing numbers of pedestrians, with use of two UAV guidance approaches: partial guidance and full guidance. The experimental results suggest that exploiting UAVs in crowd evacuation and following the partial guidance approach can lead to a more efficient evacuation process. crowd; emergency; evacuation; Net Logo simulation; unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) +
Footnote †: journal: Medical  
the scheduling of the UAVs during evacuation [18]. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the existing studies has focused on the aspect of different approaches to guidance when using UAVs, which can be used to guide evacuees during an evacuation process. The aspect of guidance approaches when using UAVs is of particular significance, as this can differ in real-world cases. UAVs can be used to conduct partial guidance or full guidance (these approaches will be elaborated further in Section 3) during an evacuation process. As these important factors are yet to be investigated in the literature, this paper examines the notions of crowd guidance using UAVs in depth through studying diverse scenarios. It is also very important to explore the various options for placement of UAVs--for example, whether they should be placed at the middle of the evacuation space, near the exit, or in a random fashion - when exploring their applicability in crowd evacuation. To the best of our knowledge, this aspect is yet to be analyzed in the literature. Therefore, this study also attempts to perform rigorous analysis over diverse placements of UAVs. It is worth mentioning that UAVs should be explored in terms of their potential to improve the efficiency of pedestrian evacuation in crowds. A UAV is an aircraft that can fly without a pilot on board [1]. It can be controlled by a remote operator or fly based on a specific program. UAVs have already been used for many applications in the context of smart cities and public safety, besides their prominent military and commercial applications [2]. However, as mentioned above, their applicability in the context of emergency pedestrian crowd evacuation from the perspectives of crowd guidance and UAV placement is yet to be explored in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on UAV-based emergency guidance and evacuation planning to explore the applicability of UAVs in the context of emergency pedestrian guidance and the evacuation of crowds. To do so, we first propose different methodologies for UAV-augmented guidance. To evaluate the outcomes of our proposed methodologies, we built a model that can simulate pedestrian guidance and evacuation under different scenarios with regard to the number of pedestrians, the position of exits, and the positions of the UAVs. The main contributions of this paper are:  
* Two new methodologies for UAV-augmented emergency pedestrian guidance and crowd evacuation, namely, full guidance and partial guidance. * Amodel for the proposed methodologies which simulates pedestrian evacuation under different scenarios involving diverse UAV placements. * The evaluation of the proposed methodologies against alternative solutions in terms of two performance metrics: average evacuation time and mortality.