Establishing the Proper Seating Arrangement in Elevated Lecture Halls for a Faster Evacuation Process

Abstract

As time is crucial in the human evacuation process during an emergency situation, several aspects related to how the humans involved in such a process act have been studied over the time, underlying that the humans' behavior is rather unpredictable and depends on social background, emotions, the degree of familiarity with the environment, age, gender, and so on. On the other hand, it has been determined that the characteristics of the environment are important in such situations as they may facilitate a shorter evacuation time. It has been shown that exits characteristics, such as width or their number, have a positive direct impact on the evacuation time. In this context, this paper aims to analyze another environmental aspect, namely, the seat arrangement, and to determine how the seats should be placed in order to reduce the evacuation time for a given configuration of the doors. On this purpose, an elevated lecture hall with two exits has been chosen, as it represents one of the most populated places within the public buildings, characterized not only by a high population density but also by a limited capacity to escape. A case study has been conducted using 97 human subjects and an agent-based model has been created considering their individual characteristics. The model has been simulated on eight different seat arrangements for 15 different positions on the two exitdoors. As a result, the proper seating arrangement for each of the 15 exit-door positions has been presented along with the study's limitations.

Investigating the Exits’ Symmetry Impact on the Evacuation Process of Classrooms and Lecture Halls: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach

“…A series of elements have been considered in the literature related to individuals' behaviors, either in terms of cooperation [1,2] or competition [3], such as, but not limited to: age [4][5][6], social background [7], the degree of familiarity with the environment [8], the degree of selfishness [9], the presence or absence of guidance or authority figures [4,[10][11][12], the occurrence of herd behavior [13], pressure [14,15], emotions [13,16], or by considering different settings of the environment, such as the presence of a single/multiple exit doors [17][18][19], the width of the door [20], the distance to the exit door [21,22], the visibility of the exits [23], the occurrence of different objects [24,25], or limited visibility [26]. The presence of an obstacle in front of an exit has been a controversial and highly studied aspect in the literature.…”

“…Despite the limitations, a series of evacuation researches have been made using NetLogo in the area of: large areas flood evacuation [51], large areas tsunami evacuation [104], large areas hurricane evacuation [105], multimodal tsunami evacuation [106], large event halls evacuation [42,107], improving building emergency evacuation plans [56], classroom evacuation [10,18], fire drills simulations in schools [108], etc.…”

“…In a recent paper, Zuriguel et al [34] studied the effect of an obstacle placed in front of the exit, and the authors concluded that this situation slightly favors the evacuation of the persons near the wall, prompting a debate on the role of the column in an evacuation process. Even more, the role of the exit location is questioned in Wu et al [3], in which the authors conduct an experiment using mice and changing the position of the exit door by moving it from the long to the short wall of the test container.Depending on the type of the environment in which the evacuation might take place, a series of studies in the literature have addressed the evacuation of ships [35], metro stations [11,36], metro trains and high-speed trains [37,38], hospitals [39,40], stadiums [41], concert halls [42], supermarkets [43], rooms [34,44], auditorium [45], classrooms and lecture halls [18,46,47], ascending stair evacuation [48], large indoor building spaces [49], large buildings [50], large exterior spaces [51], etc.Among the public building evacuation situations, classrooms and the lecture halls hold an important place, as these spaces generally present a high population density and a restrained evacuation capacity [18,52]. The seat and desk placement among these types of learning rooms can take various forms, which, combined with the exit doors' positions, can have an impact on the overall evacuation time [53].…”

“…">State of the Art in Classrooms and Lecture Halls' EvacuationThe evacuation process from classrooms and lecture halls has attracted a series of researchers, each of them trying to address the problem from different angles. As a result, the researches made Symmetry 2020, 12, 627 3 of 25 within this area have focused on, but have not been limited to: methodological aspects needed to be considered when conducting a simulation [59], the variables needed to be taken into account [60], conducting on-the-field trials in order to extract behavioral characteristics of the evacuees [18], the effect of various room settings on the evacuation process and overall evacuation time [61,62], the role of guidance [63], etc. As the literature addressing the classrooms and lecture halls evacuation is vast, in the following, only some of the above aspects will be discussed, on the purpose of offering a general field coverage in terms of methodology, means and expected results.From a methodological point of view, in a recent paper, Lovreglio et al[59] considered four sampling approaches and conducted eight trial evacuations using a classroom-based scenario.…”

“…Among the public building evacuation situations, classrooms and the lecture halls hold an important place, as these spaces generally present a high population density and a restrained evacuation capacity [18,52]. The seat and desk placement among these types of learning rooms can take various forms, which, combined with the exit doors' positions, can have an impact on the overall evacuation time [53].…”