Selfishness- and Selflessness-based models of pedestrian room evacuation

• Selfishness- and Selflessness-based model of pedestrian room evacuation is proposed.
• The selfish nature of human has counter effect of the total evacuation time.
• Pedestrian’ sympathy shows positive effect on evacuation efficiency.
• Door width has little influence when it is greater than 6 (room size over 50 ×  50).

Some pedestrian evacuation studies have employed game strategy to deal with moving conflicts involving two or three pedestrians. However, most of these have simply presented game strategies for pedestrians without analyzing the reasons why they choose to defect or cooperate. We believe that selfish and selfless behaviors are two main factors that should be considered in evacuation. In addition to these behaviors, human emotions such as sympathy and behaviors such as vying were also taken into account to investigate their impacts on pedestrians’ strategies. Moreover, an essential objective factor, the building design factor of door width was tested and analyzed. Experimental results showed that the sense of self leads to more defectors and a longer evacuation time. However, sympathy does some good, leading to more cooperators and a shorter evacuation time. Moreover, the exit door width is an essential factor of the evacuation efficiency. When the width was less than 6 cells in a rectangular room with a size greater than 50 × 50, the evacuation time greatly decreased when the width increased. However, this effect was less obvious when the width increased.