Development of an evacuation model considering the impact of stress variation on evacuees under fire emergency

•A novel model to quantify the stress level of evacuees in a fire evacuation.•The impact of stress variation on evacuees under fire pressure is investigated.•Egress dynamics of evacuees under a compartment room fire scenario are characterised.•Results highlight the importance to consider stress in c...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Safety science 2021-06, Vol.138, p.105232, Article 105232
Main Authors: Cao, Rui Feng, Lee, Eric Wai Ming, Yuen, Anthony Chun Yin, Chan, Qing Nian, Xie, Wei, Shi, Meng, Yeoh, Guan Heng
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Crowd evacuation
Escape behavior
Evacuation
Evacuations & rescues
Fire hazards
Fire safety
Fires
Risk perception
Social force model
Stress
Stress variation
Variation
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•A novel model to quantify the stress level of evacuees in a fire evacuation.•The impact of stress variation on evacuees under fire pressure is investigated.•Egress dynamics of evacuees under a compartment room fire scenario are characterised.•Results highlight the importance to consider stress in crowd safety assessment. When evacuees directly confront a life-endangering situation in a fire accident, the raised stress created by the physical threat of fire tends to affect evacuees' escape behaviours (i.e., shifting from a calm exit mannerism to a stressful escape behaviour). This behavioural phenomenon inevitably affects crowd movement patterns and subsequently, the overall evacuation characteristics. However, limited works address the impact of stress variation on evacuees under the pressure of a fire emergency. In this paper, we propose an evacuation model to numerically determine the stress level of evacuees according to their specific surrounding environment. Hence, it enables evacuees to perceive the fire risk and acts in response to the fire hazard. Rather than solely placing emphasis on representing the physical movement of evacuees only, as are the common approach used in previous works, this study focuses on the influence of stress factor on the crowd evacuation performance. Our proposed model contributes to a better understanding of the crowd evacuation dynamics by investigating the effect of stress variation on evacuees, which provides an additional aspect of insight to existing evacuation frameworks.
ISSN:0925-7535
1879-1042
DOI:10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105232