Human-Ant Behavior in Evacuation Dynamics

PARISI DANIEL R.; JOSENS, ROXANA

Jülich

Conferencia; Traffic and Granular Flow '13; 2013

During a life-and-death situation a highly competitive crowd could rush to- wards the exit causing a blockage. An example of this phenomena was observed at "The Station" nightclub fire (2003, USA). On the contrary, social insects do not follow this behavior. Recent experiments have shown that ants (Camponotus mus and Linepithema humile) do not cause jams near the exit for none of intensities of the different aversive stimuli considered (chemical repellent and heat). The ants maintain their cooperative behavior even in situations of "emergency". From these results it is clear that the information obtained from ants should not be extrapolated directly to human systems. However, keeping in mind the opposite behaviors displaying by ants and humans, some valid ques- tions can be asked: - How the evacuation performance of a crowd can be enhanced if a fraction of the people would follow the ant strategy? - What is the optimal of this fraction to maximize the evacuation perfor- mance and minimize the blockage probability? In order to answer these questions, the room evacuation problem was sim- ulated using the social force model considering different mixtures of both behaviors for the simulated pedestrians.