Estimating the effects of mental disorientation and physical fatigue in a semi-panic evacuation

Abstract

Understanding the impossibility of replicating a real panic emergency situation and experimenting human objects in such artificially created dangerous situation, this paper focuses on the evacuation of a heterogeneous population including people with disabilities in a semi-panic simulated situation in which people tend to hurry more than those in non-panic evacuation but exhibit less urgency than those in a panic emergency. Ultimately, we intend to estimate and quantify the effects of mental disorientation and physical fatigue on the average evacuation times of six different disability groups and the entire group in a simulated environment of a 24-story building. According to our experiments, mental disorientation due to sudden emotion escalation from the recognition of unexpected dangers increases the average evacuation times up to 25 percent depending on the complexity of evacuation routes of the simulated buildings. In addition, accumulated physical fatigue of human beings during the evacuation process could also significantly delay the evacuation time. Most of all, the impact magnitudes of these two main factors vary depending on the types of disabilities of individuals, insinuating the needs of developing evacuation plans and strategies for each group. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.