Room evacuation through two contiguous exits

I. STICCO; GUILLERMO FRANK; C. O. DORSO

PHYSICA A - STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL PHYSICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2017 vol. 474 p. 172 - 185

0378-4371

Current regulations demand that at least two exits should be available for a safe evacuation duringa panic situation. Although the ?faster is slower? effect is expected to take place near the exits, theevacuation time will improve because of the additional exits. However, rooms having contiguousdoors not always reduce the leaving time as expected. We investigated the relation between the doorsseparation and the evacuation performance. We found that there exists a separation distance rangethat does not really improve the evacuation time, or it can even worsen the process performance.To our knowledge, no attention has been given to this issue in the literature. This work reports howthe pedestrians dynamics differ when the separation distance between two exit doors changes andhow this affects the overall performance.