An evacuation model accounting for elementary students’ individual properties

•An evacuation model for elementary student is proposed.•Two potentials for rational and irrational students are defined.•The effects of irrational students on the evacuation efficiency are studied.•The effects of the failure probability of the repulsive force on the evacuation process are studied.

In this paper, we propose a cellular automata model for pedestrian flow to investigate the effects of elementary students’ individual properties on the evacuation process in a classroom with two exits. In this model, each student’s route choice behavior is determined by the capacity of his current route to each exit, the distance between his current position and the corresponding exit, the repulsive interactions between his adjacent students and him, and the congestion degree near each exit; the elementary students are sorted into rational and irrational students. The simulation results show that the irrational students’ proportion has significant impacts on the evacuation process and efficiency, and that all students simultaneously evacuating may be inefficient.