An effective control of large systems of active particles: An application to evacuation problem

Manipulation of large systems of active particles is a serious challenge across diverse domains, including crowd management, control of robotic swarms, and coordinated material transport. The development of advanced control strategies for complex scenarios is hindered, however, by the lack of scalability and robustness of the existing methods, in particular, due to the need of an individual control for each agent. One possible solution involves controlling a system through a leader or a group of leaders, which other agents tend to follow. Using such an approach we develop an effective control strategy for a leader, combining reinforcement learning (RL) with artificial forces acting on the system. To describe the guidance of active particles by a leader we introduce the generalized Vicsek model. This novel method is then applied to the problem of the effective evacuation by a robot-rescuer (leader) of large groups of people from hazardous places. We demonstrate, that while a straightforward application of RL yields suboptimal results, even for advanced architectures, our approach provides a robust and efficient evacuation strategy. The source code supporting this study is publicly available at: https://github.com/cinemere/evacuation.