Redefining the role of obstacles in pedestrian evacuation
Redefining the role of obstacles in pedestrian evacuation
复制标题
DOI：
10.1088/1367-2630/aaf4ca
复制
发表时间：
2018-12-21
影响因子：
3.3
通讯作者：
Zuriguel, I
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Garcimartin, A.;Maza, D.;Zuriguel, I
在门前设置障碍物被认为是增加行人流量、从而改善疏散过程的有效策略。自从首次提出以来，这种反直觉的特征就被认为是人流通过瓶颈的标志。事实上，尽管实验证据很少，但设置障碍物仍被誉为解决疏散问题的灵丹妙药。在这项工作中，我们挑战了这一想法，并通过实验证明行人流量不一定会因障碍物的存在而改变。这一结果与最近关于其适用于颗粒介质、绵羊和小鼠的情况的论证不一致，与大多数现有数值模型的结果不同，并警告人们不小心将动物行为外推到人类的风险。我们的实验结果还揭示了与出口前人群运动相关的一个未被注意到的现象：在竞争性疏散中，障碍物会减弱集体横向冲撞的发展，这种冲撞是危险的，因为可能会导致跌倒。
The placement of obstacles in front of doors is believed to be an effective strategy to increase the flow of pedestrians, hence improving the evacuation process. Since it was first suggested, this counter-intuitive feature is considered a hallmark of pedestrian flows through bottlenecks. Indeed, despite the little experimental evidence, the placement of an obstacle has been hailed as the panacea for solving evacuation problems. In this work, we challenge this idea and experimentally demonstrate that the pedestrians flow rate is not necessarily altered by the presence of an obstacle. This result-which is at odds with recent demonstrations on its suitability for the cases of granular media, sheep and mice- differs from the outcomes of most of existing numerical models, and warns about the risks of carelessly extrapolating animal behaviour to humans. Our experimental findings also reveal an unnoticed phenomenon in relation with the crowd movement in front of the exit: in competitive evacuations, an obstacle attenuates the development of collective transversal rushes, which are hazardous as they might cause falls.