Crowd evacuation guidance systems are of great significance for protecting lives and reducing personal and property losses during disasters in buildings. Existing crowd evacuation guidance systems require the manual design of models and input parameters

incurring significant workloads and potential errors. An end-to-end intelligent evacuation guidance method based on deep reinforcement learning was proposed

and an interactive simulation environment based on the social force model was designed. The agent could automatically learn a scene model and explore the path planning strategy by interacting with simulation environment and through trial and error with only scene images as input

and then directly output dynamic signage information

thus achieving the crowd evacuation guidance efficiently. Aiming to solve the “dimension disaster” phenomenon of deep Q network (DQN) algorithm caused by high dimension action space and complex network structure in crowd evacuation

a combined action-space DQN algorithm was proposed. The algorithm grouped the output layer nodes of the Q network according to action dimensions

significantly reduced the network complexity

and improved the practicality of the system in complex scenes with multiple guidance signs. Experiments in different simulation scenes demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the static guidance method in evacuation time and on par with the manually designed model method. It shows that the proposed method can effectively guide the crowd

improve the evacuation efficiency

and reduce the workload and artificial errors of manually designed models.