Evaluating impact of table layout in classroom evacuation with crowd simulation

Sammanfattning: With the rise of hazardous events in classroom and school settings, the need for efficient and safe evacuation planning has never been more vital. Relying on intuition to draw conclusions, while often well intended, can do more harm than good. Previous studies into human behavior during emergency evacuations show that ineffective evacuation processes can lead to injuries, and even prove to be fatal, themselves. Most research into the area of evaluating the efficiency of certain evacuation processes focuses on one metric, the total time it takes for the room population to evacuate the room. This study shows that while it is a critical metric, there are other metrics that could, and maybe should, be taken into consideration. This thesis studies the effects certain table layouts have on the time it takes for people to evacuate a room using advanced crowd simulation. The simulation system builds upon treating the crowd as a unilaterally incompressible fluid. The digital environment is modeled after a classroom at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The two key factors studied are the amount of paths to the exit available to the evacuees, and the evacuation time of percentages of the room population. The results indicate that the amount of paths available to the evacuees does not impact the average total evacuation time. They do, however, show that certain layouts can lead to faster evacuation times but less consistently, while others can lead to slower evacuation times but more consistently. They also show that while certain layouts may yield faster total evacuation times, the time it takes for different percentages of the total room population to evacuate can be considerably slower than other layouts that have slower total evacuation times. While this does bring great moral and ethical implications with it that cannot, and should not, be avoided - when it comes to studies into saving lives, everything needs to be considered.