Room evacuation in the presence of a obstacle

V.FRANK; C.O. DORSO

PHYSICA A - STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL PHYSICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2011 p. 2135 - 2145

0378-4371

The investigation of human behaviour trying to escape from a room under panic is an importantissue in complex systems research. Several authors called the attention on the fact that placing anobstacle near the exit, improves the evacuation time of the room [1–5]. We studied this effect inthe context of the “social force model” [1]. We show that placing an obstacle does not guarantee,by itself, better chances of survival for all pedestrians. The way they choose to avoid the obstacleis critical for their own performance. We found that not only the faster they try to escape, theslower they get out (“faster is slower” effect), but also, the short cut they might take in order toget to the exit will probably do no better (“clever is not always better” effect).