Evacuation from a Room with two (contiguous) Exits

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

chicago

Congreso; 2016 Joint Statistical Meetings (American Statistical Association); 2016

ASA

Current regulations demand that at least two exits should be available fora safe evacuation during a panic situation. The second exit is expected toreduce the overall clogging, and consequently, improve the evacuation time.However, rooms having contiguous doors not always reduce the leaving timeas expected. We investigated the relation between the door?s separation andthe evacuation performance. We found that there exists a separation distancerange that does not really improve the evacuation time, or it can even worsenthe process performance. To our knowledge, no attention has been given tothis issue in the literature. This work reports how the pedestrian?s dynamicsdiffer when the separation distance between two exit doors changes and howthis affects the overall performance.