The Impact of Pedestrian Lane Formation by Obstacles on Fire Evacuation Efficiency in the Presence of Unfair Competition

After a fire breaks out, pedestrians simultaneously move towards the exit and quickly form a crowded area near the exit. With the intensification of pedestrians’ tendencies towards unfair competition, there is an increase in pushing and collisions within the crowd. The possibility of stampedes within the crowd also gradually increases. Analyzing the causes and psychological tendencies behind pedestrian pushing and collisions has a positive effect on reducing crowd instability and improving evacuation efficiency. This research proposes a modified social force model considering the unfair competition tendency of pedestrians. The model considers factors such as the gap between pedestrians’ actual and maximum achievable speed, effective radius, and their distance from the exit. In order to overcome the shortage of “deadlock” in the classical social force model in a high-density environment, this research introduces the feature of variable pedestrian effective radius. The effective radius of pedestrians dynamically changes according to the density of the surrounding crowd and queuing time. Through validation, the evacuation efficiency of this model aligns well with the actual situation and effectively reflects pedestrians’ pushing and squeezing behaviors in high-density environments. This research also analyzes how to strategically arrange obstacles to mitigate the exacerbating effect of unfair pedestrian competition on exit congestion. Five experiments were conducted to analyze how the relative position of obstacles and exits, the number of evacuation paths, and the size of the obstacle-free area before the exit affect evacuation efficiency in the presence of unfair pedestrian competition. The results show that evacuation efficiency can be improved when obstacles play a role in guiding or reducing the interaction of pedestrians in different queues. However, when obstacles hinder pedestrians, the evacuation efficiency is reduced to a certain extent.