Necessity of guides in pedestrian emergency evacuation

Yang, Xiaoxia; Dong, Hairong; Yao, Xiuming; Sun, Xubin; Wang, Qianling; Zhou, Min

doi:10.1016/j.physa.2015.08.020

Cited by 63 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our analysis of the optimality at the individual level identified the effect of crowdedness level as a moderator of the decision optimality. From a practical perspective, this highlights the importance of providing guidance [55][56][57][58][59] or assisting the decisions of evacuees, when the evacuations take place in heavily crowded facilities.…”

Section: Rationality Analysis At the Micro (Individual) Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Rationality’ in Collective Escape Behaviour: Identifying Reference Points of Measurement at Micro and Macro Levels

Haghani

Sarvi

2019

Journal of Advanced Transportation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background. Evacuation behaviour of human crowds is often characterised by the notion of ‘irrational behaviour’. While the term has been frequently used in the literature, clear definitions and methods for measuring rationality do not exist. Objective. Here, we suggest that rationality, in this context, can alternatively and more effectively be formulated as a question of ‘optimal behaviour’. Decision optimality can potentially be measured and quantified. The main challenges, however, include (i) distinctly identifying the level at which we measure optimality, and (ii) identifying proper reference points at each level. Methods. We differentiate between optimality at the individual (i.e., micro) and the system (i.e., macro/aggregate) levels and illustrate how certain reference points can be established at each level. We suggest that, at the micro level, optimality of individual decisions can be quantified by comparing the outcome of each individual’s decision to those of their ‘nearly equal peers’. At the macro level, optimality can be measured by simulating the system using parametric numerical models and measuring the system performance while altering the behavioural parameters compared to their empirical estimates. Results. Having applied these methods, we observed that variation in micro level decision optimality rises rapidly as the space becomes more heavily crowded. As crowdedness increases in the environment, the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ decisions becomes more distinct; and suboptimal decisions become more frequent. In other words, optimality at individual level seems to be moderated by the level of crowdedness. At the macro level, numerical simulations showed that, for certain exit attributes (like exit congestion), extreme marginal valuations (or preferences) were optimal, whereas for certain other attributes (like exit visibility), intermediate levels of valuation were closer to the optimal. In most cases, the natural observed (or estimated) tendency of evacuees (at the aggregate level) was not quite at the optimum level, meaning that the system could improve by modifying individuals’ marginal valuations of exit attributes. Applications and Recommendations. These results highlight the importance of guiding evacuation decisions particularly in heavily crowded spaces. They also theoretically illustrate the potential benefit of influencing/modifying people’s evacuation strategies, so they make decisions that are collectively more efficient. A crucial step to this end, however, is to identify what optimum strategy is and under what circumstances people are likelier to make suboptimal decisions.

show abstract

Section: Rationality Analysis At the Micro (Individual) Levelmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Rationality’ in Collective Escape Behaviour: Identifying Reference Points of Measurement at Micro and Macro Levels

Haghani

Sarvi

2019

Journal of Advanced Transportation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Fluid dynamic models are the most recognized macroscopic models [52,53], which use the analogy of fluid dynamics to describe the crowd flow in the form of partial differential equations [54]. Fluid-dynamic models and social force models are continuous in space and time, compared to cellular automata models and lattice gas models, where space and time are discrete [22].…”

Section: Evacuation Models and Crowd Dynamicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating Decentralized Indoor Evacuation with Information Depositories in the Field

Zhao

Winter

Tomko

2017

IJGI

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:The lonelier evacuees find themselves, the riskier become their wayfinding decisions. This research supports single evacuees in a dynamically changing environment with risk-aware guidance. It deploys the concept of decentralized evacuation, where evacuees are guided by smartphones acquiring environmental knowledge and risk information via exploration and knowledge sharing by peer-to-peer communication. Peer-to-peer communication, however, relies on the chance that people come into communication range with each other. This chance can be low. To bridge between people being not at the same time at the same places, this paper suggests information depositories at strategic locations to improve information sharing. Information depositories collect the knowledge acquired by the smartphones of evacuees passing by, maintain this information, and convey it to other passing-by evacuees. Multi-agent simulation implementing these depositories in an indoor environment shows that integrating depositories improves evacuation performance: It enhances the risk awareness and consequently increases the chance that people survive and reduces their evacuation time. For evacuating dynamic events, deploying depositories at staircases has been shown more effective than deploying them in corridors.

show abstract

“…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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the evacuation problem has attracted and continues to attract a series of researchers due to its high importance both for saving human lives and for reducing the material losses in such situations, the present paper analyses whether the evacuation doors configuration in the case of classrooms and lecture halls matters in reducing the evacuation time. For this aim, eighteen possible doors configurations have been considered along with five possible placements of desks and chairs. The doors configurations have been divided into symmetrical and asymmetrical clusters based on the two doors positions within the room. An agent-based model has been created in NetLogo which allows a fast configuration of the classrooms and lecture halls in terms of size, number of desks and chairs, desks and chair configuration, exits' size, the presence of fallen objects, type of evacuees and their speed. The model has been used for performing and analyzing various scenarios. Based on these results, it has been observed that, in most cases, the symmetrical doors configurations provide good/optimal results, while only some of the asymmetrical doors configurations provide comparable/better results. The model is configurable and can be used in various scenarios.Symmetry 2020, 12, 627 2 of 25 demonstrated the beneficial effect of such an obstacle, a series of other studies have followed [28], some of them revealing a smaller positive effect [29,30], others stating the influence based on the dimension and position of the obstacle [31], while others proving the ineffectiveness of such a situation [32,33]. 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]. Furthermore, the complexity of the i...

show abstract

Necessity of guides in pedestrian emergency evacuation

Cited by 63 publications

References 14 publications

‘Rationality’ in Collective Escape Behaviour: Identifying Reference Points of Measurement at Micro and Macro Levels

‘Rationality’ in Collective Escape Behaviour: Identifying Reference Points of Measurement at Micro and Macro Levels

Integrating Decentralized Indoor Evacuation with Information Depositories in the Field

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About