Wall-following behaviour during evacuation under limited visibility: experiment and modelling

Abstract

Wall-following is an important means for pedestrians to navigate during evacuation under limited visibility. Empirical and experimental results regarding wall-following behaviour are scarce in the literature. How pedestrians approach a wall, how they decide on a wall-following direction, and how they address conflicts are still poorly understood. To these ends, we performed evacuation experiments in a mock room. Each participant wore a baseball cap covered with an opaque veil to create a limited visibility condition. Experiment results showed the participants stretched out their arms and attempted to search for the wall tactually in 205 of 270 cases, and in the remaining cases, the participants searched for the wall visually rather than tactually. The findings also reveal underlying behaviour pattern of pedestrians on the decision of wall-following direction. Finally, we propose a wall-following model based on the social force model. The simulation results are consistent with the experimental outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedestrian evacuation
• limited visibility
• wall-following behaviour
• direction choice
• social force model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Shuqi Xue http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6122-9947

Xiaomeng Shi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8511-3295

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71631002, 71621001, 71901060, 71901175, 71971015) and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project Nos. 17203017, 17201318) and JST-Mirai Program, Japan (Grant Number JPMJMI17D4) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Funded Project (2019M651656).