Granular flow and evacuation of pedestrians in panic situations. Experimental verification of the "faster is slower" effect.

GAGO, PAULA A.; PARISI DANIEL R.; PUGNALONI, LUIS A.

La Plata, Prov. de Buenos Aires

Conferencia; Humboldt Kolleg - International, Conference on Physics; 2011

Previous works have demonstrated, by using simulation models, that the evacuations times of pedestrian from a room depends non-linearly on the “force of desire”. In the models studied, the evacuation time decreases when the desire force increases for low force of desire. However, for large desire forces, the evacuation times increase. This effect has been termed "faster is slower". In the models, a high desire force corresponds to panic situations, where pedestrians enter in close contact in a desperate attempt to exit the room. For this reason, no controlled experiments have been carried out to verify the "faster is slower" effect. However, a number of similarities have been suggested between pedestrian flow and granular flow. We exploit these analogous properties in the agent-agent (individuals or grains) interactions to study evacuation times in granular silos and so extrapolate some conclusions on pedestrian flow.