Information use by humans during dynamic route choice in virtual crowd evacuations

Bode, Nikolai W. F.; Wagoum, Armel Ulrich Kemloh; Codling, Edward A.

doi:10.1098/rsos.140410

Cited by 66 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The simulation framework for the virtual experiment extends established methodology (Bode et al, 2014;Bode and Codling, 2013). In total, we recruit 146 volunteers at the University of Science and Technology of China to take part in the experiment in 2018.…”

Section: Virtual Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similarly, this suggests that pedestrians avoid queues (Bode et al, 2014(Bode et al, , 2015bBode and Codling, 2013;Haghani and Sarvi, 2016;Liao et al, 2017;Zhang and He, 2014) and we therefore expect that individuals select exits or routes around obstacles that are associated with a lower local density of pedestrians. Finally, time-dependent information, such as the speed at which other pedestrians move in the local neighborhood of exits or obstacles can be indicative of how quickly different routes can be completed and pedestrians may thus be drawn toward local areas of higher average walking speeds (Bode et al, 2015b). We do not aim to uncover fundamentally novel aspects of pedestrian route choice behavior here, but a secondary contribution of our work is a confirmation of previous findings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Comparing the route-choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles in a virtual experiment and a field study

Zhang

Long

et al. 2019

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies

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Highlights We analyze pedestrian route choice behavior around obstacles in a simple scenario  We compare a field study and a virtual experiment with identical setups  We find qualitatively similar results in both settings  This helps to validate virtual experiments as a useful methodology AbstractPedestrians often need to decide between different routes they can use to reach their intended destinations, both during emergencies and in their daily lives. This routechoice behavior is important in determining traffic management, evacuation efficiency and building design. Here, we use field observations and a virtual experiment to study the route choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles delimiting exit routes and examine the influence of three factors, namely the local distance to route starting points  Corresponding author: Jun Zhang, Email: junz@ustc.edu.cn 2 and the pedestrian density and walking speeds along routes. Crucially, both field study and virtual experiment consider the same scenario which allows us to directly assess the validity of testing pedestrian behavior in virtual environments. We find that in both data sets the proportion of people who choose a closer exit route increases as the difference in distance between exit route starting points increases. Pedestrians' choices in our data also depend on pedestrian density along routes, with people preferring less used routes. Our results thus confirm previously established route choice mechanisms and we can predict over 74% of choices based on these factors. The qualitative agreement in results between the field study and the virtual experiment suggests that in simple route-choice scenarios, such as the one we investigate here, virtual experiments can be a valid experimental technique for studying pedestrian behavior. We therefore provide much-needed empirical support for the emerging paradigm of experiments in virtual environments.

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Section: Virtual Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Comparing the route-choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles in a virtual experiment and a field study

Zhang

Long

et al. 2019

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies

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“…Individuals may use inadvertent social information such as age [6,7] or speed [8] to identify the more performant individuals and follow them. This social information transmission can lead to contagious and collective behaviours such as those observed in human crowds and pedestrian traffic [9,10]. …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural influence of social information use in pedestrian road-crossing behaviours

Péle¹,

Bellut

Debergue

et al. 2017

R. Soc. open sci.

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Social information use is common in a wide range of group-living animals, notably in humans. The role it plays in decision-making could be a key to understanding how social groups make collective decisions. The observation of road-crossing behaviours in the presence of other individuals is an ideal means to study the influence of social information on decision-making. This study investigated the influence of culture on social information used by pedestrians in a potentially dangerous scenario, namely road crossing. We scored the collective crossing of pedestrians at four locations in Nagoya (Japan) and three locations in Strasbourg (France). French pedestrians cross against the lights much more often (41.9%) than Japanese ones (2.1%). Individuals deciding to cross the road were strongly influenced by the behaviour and the presence of other pedestrians, especially in Japan, where a stronger conformism was noted. However, Japanese pedestrians were half as likely to be influenced by social information as their French counterparts when crossing at the red light, as they were more respectful of rules. Men show riskier behaviour than women (40.6% versus 25.7% of rule-breaking, respectively), deciding quickly and setting off earlier than women. Further related studies could help target specific preventive, culture-specific solutions for pedestrian safety.

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“…density of pedestrians around the exit). However, there are other factors such as visibility of the exits [36,38], tendency to follow other pedestrians [55], tendency to keep going straight [19,50], familiarity with egress environment [24,56] and following evacuation signs [49,57,58] which have received far less attention in the literature. The phenomenon of people's decisions being influenced by others' choices, known in the literature as herding behaviour, is a well-addressed topic in a variety of disciplines and contexts, notably in psychology [59] and finance [60].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedestrian crowd tactical‐level decision making during emergency evacuations

Haghani

Sarvi

2016

J of Advced Transportation

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This paper investigates pedestrian crowd tactical-level decision making during emergency evacuations. Of particular interest is crowd exit-choice behaviour. Two sources of stated choice data are collected and combined. One data set is derived from an experiment linked to a real-life exit choice experience of participants (in a non-evacuation setting). We examine aspects that have often been taken for granted in the literature in connection with egress behaviour of crowds during emergencies. We quantify evacuees' trade-off between "distance", "density", "exit visibility" and "directional density" as well as the interactive effect between exit visibility and tendency to follow others. A comprehensive random-utility analysis is conducted ranging from traditionally practiced models to the state-of-the-practice methods such as random-coefficient nested logit. Our findings suggest that (i) unless evacuees face certain levels of uncertainty in the escape environment; flows of crowd are unlikely to be followed. Otherwise, most evacuees perceive other individuals as potential sources of congestion and extra delay (generalisation to situations where crowd is completely unfamiliar with the egress geometry, however, may require careful scrutiny). (ii) Evacuees mostly prefer visible exits over the exits whose congestion level is unknown to them (i.e. the tendency to minimise ambiguity). (iii) The presence of attribute uncertainty (e.g. exit visibility) significantly changes the impact of observing decisions of others on each individual choice maker. We also found out that (iv) spatial distribution of exits has a significant influence on evacuees' decisions (presenting itself in the form of violating the IIA assumption). (v) The marginal weights that different individuals place upon attributes of exits are significantly heterogeneous. (vi) There is meaningful correlation between certain utility weights of individual evacuees. These behavioural findings can provide significant behavioural insight essential for safe evacuation planning and accurate forecast of evacuees' behaviour.All other model estimation results were obtained from NLOGIT 5.

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Information use by humans during dynamic route choice in virtual crowd evacuations

Cited by 66 publications

References 35 publications

Comparing the route-choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles in a virtual experiment and a field study

Comparing the route-choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles in a virtual experiment and a field study

Cultural influence of social information use in pedestrian road-crossing behaviours

Pedestrian crowd tactical‐level decision making during emergency evacuations

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