Behavioral effects in room evacuation models

Abstract

In this work we study a model for the evacuation of pedestrians from an enclosure considering a continuous space substrate and discrete time. We analyze the influence of behavioral features that affect the use of the empty space, that can be linked to the attitudes or characters of the pedestrians. We study how the interaction of different behavioral profiles affects the needed time to evacuate completely a room and the occurrence of clogging. We find that neither fully egotistic nor fully cooperative attitudes are optimal from the point of view of the crowd. In contrast, intermediate behaviors provide lower evacuation times. This leads us to identify some phenomena closely analogous to the faster-is-slower effect. The proposed model allows for distinguishing between the role of the attitudes in the search for empty space and the attitudes in the conflicts.