Evacuation through area with obstacle that can be stepped over: experimental study
Zhong-Jun Ding, Zhiwei Shen, Ning Guo, Kongjin Zhu, Jiancheng Long
Abstract
Abstract This paper reports on a series of evacuation experiments exploring the impact of different obstacles on crowd dynamics. The experiments include three scenarios: evacuation without any obstacle (NO), evacuation with a bar-type obstacle in which the participants can choose to pass by or step over (CO), and evacuation with a bar-type obstacle in which the participants can only pass by (PO). The height of the obstacle and the distance between the obstacle and the exit in the CO cases are also taken into account. The evacuation times in the CO cases are basically longer than those in the PO cases. But a low CO obstacle very close to the exit can enhance the evacuation efficiency, compared to that of a PO obstacle. As the height of the CO obstacle increases, the pedestrian cluster around the exit separates into two clusters around the obstacle corners. In addition, the longer the distance between the CO obstacle and the exit, the fewer pedestrians prefer to step over the obstacle.