Influence of pedestrian psychology on evacuation dynamics with the guide of emergency signage

Abstract

How to simulate the true pedestrians' psychology who face an emergency is an important issue that decides evacuation efficiency. Pedestrian psychology during the evacuation process is complex, abstract and difficult to quantify directly. Based on the typical social force model, this paper improves the pedestrian direction selection procedure and introduces a “weight factor” to adjust the degree of contribution of “the density factor” and “the distance factor” to pedestrians' choice of moving direction. In this model, pedestrians can not only roughly estimate the distance between themselves and each exit, but also judge the degree of crowd gathering near each exit by virtue of the electronic display screen in the center of the cross-shaped aisle. Simulation results show that, for a configuration with multi-rooms and multi-exits, when the pedestrian number reaches a certain level, only considering the distance factor will lead to uneven distribution of the crowd, therefore inducing obvious congestion. On the other hand, concentrating too much on the density factor makes pedestrians hesitate to choose the appropriate exit. In conclusion, we should comprehensively consider the impact of the “density factor” and the “distance factor”, which helps to provide feasible evacuation strategies for emergency situations and to improve both evacuation efficiency and exit utilization.