Microscopic dynamics of escaping groups through an exit and a corridor

Abstract

This research explores the dynamics of emergency evacuations in the presence of social groups. The investigation was carried out in the context of the basic Social Force Model (SFM). We included attractive feelings between people belonging to the same social group, as proposed in Ref. [1]. We focused on the escaping dynamics through an emergency exit and through a corridor. We confirmed the results appearing in Ref.[1] for a desired velocity of 4 m/s, but further extended the analysis on the emergency exit to the range 1-8 m/s. We noticed that the presence of groups worsens the evacuation performance. However, very strong feelings can improve the escaping time with respect to moderate feelings. We call this phenomenon "Closer-Is-Faster", in analogy to the "Faster-Is-Slower" effect. The presence of social groups also affects the dynamic within a corridor by introducing an additional slow-down in the moving crowd.

Crowd evacuation of pairs of pedestrians

“…data obtained from evacuation drills) [9,10] and numerical simulations [11,12] have enabled us to understand the characteristics of the collective motions of pedestrians in a crowd in detail. In recent years, the evacuations of some groups have been investigated by Krüchten and Schadschneider [13] (an experimental study of the group evacuation of pupils), Collins and Frydenlund [14] (a numerical analysis of refugee groups' migrations using game theory), Rozan et al [15] (a numerical analysis of group evacuations using the social force model), and Nicolas and Hassan [16] (a review of previous studies of group evacuations). Meanwhile, the characteristics of the crowd evacuation of pairs of pedestrians (i.e.…”