Experiment and simulation of pedestrian’s behaviors during evacuation in an office

Abstract

Pedestrian evacuation in an office is a critical problem that has not been fully explored and understood, which is investigated in this paper, through conducting an evacuation experiment under emergency and developing an extended Floor Field cellular automaton (FFCA) model. The video recordings have revealed several typical patterns of pedestrian behaviors related to the distance to exit, internal layout of the office, living habits of pedestrians. Herding behavior, pedestrians’ response time, living habits, and two abnormal behaviors – backtracking and choosing farther exit – are observed from experiment video. To reproduce the evacuation process in the experiment and research pedestrian evacuation dynamics, an extended FFCA model is proposed considering the behaviors observed in the video. Through numerical simulations, proper values of sensitive parameters are obtained, which can make the simulation in line with the evacuation process in experiment. Simulation results show that living habit of pedestrians has a positive impact on evacuation efficiency while abnormal behaviors play a negative role in evacuation procedure but have little impact on total evacuation time in this experiment. Meanwhile, personal response time is a significant factor to determine total evacuation time, which cannot be ignored. This study is expected to give some advice in planning emergency evacuation schemes of such buildings, such as office, classroom, assembly room and so on.