Escaping in couples facilitates evacuation: Experimental study and modeling

TL;DR

This study investigates how escaping in couples affects evacuation efficiency through experiments and an improved social force model, showing that couples can reduce evacuation time and that the model accurately predicts these dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces an enhanced social force model incorporating couple attraction forces and demonstrates the impact of couples on evacuation times through experimental validation.

Findings

Escaping in couples reduces average evacuation time.

Evacuation speed is independent of remaining pedestrians.

The model accurately predicts evacuation dynamics with couples.

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of escaping in couples on the evacuation dynamics has been investigated via experiments and modeling. Two sets of experiments have been implemented, in which pedestrians are asked to escape either in individual or in couples. The experiments show that escaping in couples can decrease the average evacuation time. Moreover, it is found that the average evacuation time gap is essentially constant, which means that the evacuation speed essentially does not depend on the number of pedestrians that have not yet escaped. To model the evacuation dynamics, an improved social force model has been proposed, in which it is assumed that the driving force of a pedestrian cannot be fulfilled when the composition of physical forces exceeds a threshold because the pedestrian cannot keep his/her body balance under this circumstance. To model the effect of escaping in couples, attraction force has been introduced between the partners. Simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental ones.