Impact of visibility level on stooped pedestrian movement characteristics and evacuation efficiency

Maoyu Li, Zhizuan Zhou and Lizhong Yang

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2025, vol. 201, issue P1

Abstract: In fire accidents, evacuation conditions are often severely compromised by the presence of smoke, which not only reduces visibility but also causes vertical height constraints, forcing pedestrians to evacuate in a stooped posture. However, previous studies mainly focused on the influence of visibility on upright pedestrian movement, little attention has been paid to the stooped pedestrian evacuation dynamics under different visibility levels. To address this gap, this study conducted controlled corridor evacuation experiments under varying visibility levels and interaction modes. The results revealed three typical behaviors of stooped pedestrians under limited visibility: exploration, wall-following, and connection behavior. As visibility decreases, individuals exhibit slower walking speeds and longer acceleration times. Gender and interaction mode were also found to significantly influence movement, with males generally walking faster than females. Besides, reduced visibility leads to lower corridor flow rates and increased time intervals, thereby disrupting flow continuity. From a spatial perspective, lower visibility resulted in tighter clustering of pedestrians and a higher risk of congestion. The findings are helpful for understanding the movement characteristics of stooped pedestrians at different visibility levels and provide a reference for the formulation of evacuation strategies in real scenarios such as fires.

Keywords: Corridor; Stooped posture; Limited visibility; Velocity; Evacuation efficiency; Spatial distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077925011889
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:201:y:2025:i:p1:s0960077925011889

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2025.117175

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().