Impact of Lecture Hall Layout on Evacuations Using Crowd Simulations

Sammanfattning: The planning and preparation phases of emergency management are of great social interest. If appropriate safety measures can be implemented in buildings beforehand as a response to foreseeable hazards, the safety of individuals can be significantly increased. Previous research suggests that alterations to different building elements impact the evacuation rate. However, due to the unique layout of lecture halls, there is no definitive answer regarding whether evacuation rates for this building type are impacted in the same manner. In this paper, numerous crowd evacuation simulations developed in Unity3D are evaluated. The alterations selected are exit amount (2, 3 and 4 exits), exit size (50%, 60% and 70% less), and passage width between seat blocks, which has been altered by increasing the width of the seat rows (10%, 20% and 30% longer). In addition, alterations have been made to the High Density Simulator [16]. In each simulation, an alteration variation is applied to a 3D model of the F2 lecture hall at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). Finally, agents are placed inside the 3D environments to determine the alteration’s effect on the evacuation rate. The general findings indicate that increasing the number of exits and the size of both exits and the passages between seats has a positive effect on the evacuation rate. However, when introducing 4 exits the evacuation rate is no longer positively affected, which agrees with previous research. The evacuation rates were only positively impacted for the two other alterations but to different degrees. We also discuss the limitation that leads us to conclude that more research within this field is needed to confidently apply these results in real-world scenarios.