Study on evacuation of pedestrians from a room with multi-obstacles considering the effect of aisles

The evacuation process for room with multi-obstacles such as classroom and theatre has attracted attentions not only from property managers but also from inter-discipline researchers. In this study, the evacuation of a classroom was studied by means of both experiments and an extended field floor model. The experiments were conducted in a classroom with 9 rows and 16 columns obstacles. In total 98 college students participated in the normal situation evacuation. The model was extended by considering the effect of main aisles which were unique features in the multi-obstacles' rooms. Using the extended model, the evacuation from the classroom can be simulated closer to the reality and the simulation results agree well with the experimental results. Both in the experiments and simulations, the flow through each exit are smooth without stagnation. The congestions often occur at the intersections of the main aisles rather than the area near the exits. In addition, the selection of exits is unbalanced in the condition of evacuation from rooms with multi-obstacles. The study is helpful to reveal the dynamics of evacuation from multi-obstacles' room as well as to provide advices concerning crowd management.