Evacuation Simulation and Experiment Without Exit Information

The configuration of a room and the evacuee information are important factors that determine evacuation performance. While several studies have investigated the impact of these factors on evacuation behavior, little research has been done on the evacuation of a room with blocked exits and uninformed evacuees who are unaware about the position of open exit. In this paper, we propose an extended floor field model that accounts for these types of conditions and is validated by experiments. The simulation results of our model show that optimal total evacuation time is achieved when more than 40% of evacuees are informed evacuees (IEs) who know the position of the open exit if their initial positions are uniformly distributed in the crowd. Our model indicates that total evacuation time is reduced when IEs are near an open exit. In addition, our model indicates that the ratio of IEs to total evacuees, required for achieving optimal evacuation time, changes with the change in the initial position of IEs.