Psychological impatience in pedestrian evacuation: modelling, simulations and experiments

Abstract

The study of psychological impatience has provided new insights into pedestrian behaviour and evacuation dynamics. However, previous works have mostly focused on investigating the impatience of the individual pedestrian, and there is a lack of research on the effect of impatience on different groups of pedestrians. This paper introduces an evacuation model considering both the self-growth and contagion of impatience for different groups of pedestrians. We apply the model to the scenario of two rooms separated by a corridor and conduct a series of parameter analyses of the rates of impatience self-growth and contagion. We first analyse the case that two groups of pedestrians have the same impatience self-growth rate. The results show that impatience contagion has a crucial effect on evacuation efficiency. In the no-contagion scenario, both too high and too low an impatience level lead to lower evacuation efficiency. In the contagion scenario, an increasing impatience level leads to lower efficiency. We then analyse the case that two pedestrian groups have different impatience self-growth rates. The results indicate that pedestrian groups with different self-growth rates have different evacuation efficiencies, where the pedestrian group with a higher impatience self-growth rate has a lower evacuation efficiency. A higher contagion rate results in a greater difference in evacuation efficiency between the pedestrian groups with different self-growth rates. Increasing the main exit width reduces the evacuation efficiency gap. Furthermore, we conducted a series of experiments under different impatience treatments to verify the model and found that the numerical results of our model agreed with the experimental results. The findings demonstrate that the proposed impatience model has the potential to accurately predict evacuation processes.