Crawling evacuation from a room: experiment and modeling

Abstract In this paper, the impact of crawling on evacuation dynamics is investigated via experiments and modeling. Two types of experiments are implemented, in which pedestrians are asked to escape out of a virtual room with an exit either by crawling or walking. The experiments show that escaping by crawling will increase the average evacuation time. Moreover, it is found that the evacuation time gap of crawling is generally larger than that of walking. To model the evacuation dynamics, an improved heuristic-based model is proposed in which the pedestrians’ shape is represented by multiple connected circles rather than a single circle. Such representation can help the pedestrians keep a safer distance from others. Simulation results are in agreement with the experimental ones.