Study on Efficiency of Evacuation with an Obstacle on Hexagonal Cell Space

Abstract

The authors of this paper have found that putting an obstacle in front of an exit in a congested situation increases the pedestrian outflow, which is the number of pedestrians going through an exit with a unit width in a unit time, from their experiments. In this paper, the effects of conflicts and turning, which affect the pedestrian outflow significantly, are introduced by the frictional and turning functions to analyze the effect of an obstacle. They clearly explain the mechanism of the effect of an obstacle, i.e., it blocks a pedestrian moving to the exit and decreases the average number of pedestrians involved in the conflict. The authors have also studied when an obstacle contributes to ease the congestion most effectively. The results of their simulation indicate that its maximum efficacy is achieved at the point where the cluster of pedestrians is started to form. The mean traveling time of pedestrians becomes a quarter if an obstacle is set up since it prevents the formation of the cluster against increase of the inflow by reducing the impact of conflicts.

A multi-grid model for pedestrian evacuation in a room without visibility

“…Yu et al [19,58] adopted the right-moving preference to avoid conflict in front in the counter-flow model. Yanagisawa et al [59,60] studied the conflict at an exit and improved the friction parameter by the frictional function, which is a function of the number of the pedestrians involved in the conflict. Bouzat et al [61][62][63][64] solved the conflict during evacuation according to different strategies in game theory.…”

Obstacle Optimization for Panic Flow - Reducing the Tangential Momentum Increases the Escape Speed

“…Escobar et al [25] compared different shaped obstacles for their ability to enhance the outflow efficiency, and pillar(s) were found to be the most efficient and the simplest design. Yanagisawa et al [29] studied efficiency of escape with an obstacle on hexagonal cell space with human experiments and Shiwakoti et al [22] performed a series of experiments with ants to enhance the panic escape of crowd through architectural design. Although these papers [2] , [22] , [23] , [25] , [29] , [30] show clearly that pillar is a simple and effective shape of obstacle, none of them told us what is the best layout of the obstacles.…”

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

“…An extra dimension that could to be recognised is the individual variation (or heterogeneity) in strategy choosing that also could be subjected to tests of optimality using numerical analyses [79][80][81]. This stream of behavioural optimisation studies can be regarded as a complementary domain to that of the architectural optimisations that seek to facilitate evacuations through physical modifications of the environment (as opposed to the behaviour of evacuees) [82][83][84][85] or the approach of route-planning optimisations [67,[86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94].…”