Necessity of guides in pedestrian emergency evacuation

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

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 442, issue C, 397-408

Abstract: The role of guide who is in charge of leading pedestrians to evacuate in the case of emergency plays a critical role for the uninformed people. This paper first investigates the influence of mass behavior on evacuation dynamics and mainly focuses on the guided evacuation dynamics. In the extended crowd model proposed in this paper, individualistic behavior, herding behavior and environment influence are all considered for pedestrians who are not informed by the guide. According to the simulation results, herding behavior makes more pedestrians evacuate from the room in the same period of time. Besides, guided crowd demonstrates the same behavior of group dynamics which is characterized by gathering, conflicts and balance. Moreover, simulation results indicate guides with appropriate initial positions and quantity are more conducive to evacuation under a moderate initial density of pedestrians.

Keywords: Social force model; Guided crowd; Uninformed pedestrians; Desired direction; Position of guide; Quantity of guides (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:442:y:2016:i:c:p:397-408

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.08.020

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