Influence of selfish and polite behaviours on a pedestrian evacuation through a narrow exit: A quantitative characterisation

A. NICOLAS; S. BOUZAT; M. N. KUPERMAN

Hefei

Conferencia; 8th International Conference Pedestrian and Evacuation dynamics; 2016

We study the influence of selsh vs. polite behaviours on the dynamics of a pedestrian evacuation through a narrow exit. To this end, experiments involving about 80 participants with distinct prescribed behaviours are performed; reinjection of participants into the setup allowed us to improve thestatistics. Notwithstanding the fluctuations in the instantaneous ow rate, we nd that a stationary regime is almost immediately reached. The average ow rate increases monotonically with the fraction cs of vying (selsh) pedestrians, which corresponds to a faster-is-faster effect in our experimentalconditions; it is also positively correlated with the average density of pedestrians in front of the door, up to nearly close-packing. At large cs; the flow displays marked intermittency, with bursts of quasi-simultaneous escapes.In addition to these findings, we wonder whether the effect of cooperation is specic to systems of intelligent beings, or whether it can be reproduced by a purely mechanical surrogate. To this purpose, we consider a bidimensional granular flow through an orice in which some grains are madecooperative by repulsive magnetic interactions which impede their mutual collisions.