Evacuation Dynamics of Asymmetrically Coupled Pedestrian Pairs

Abstract

We propose and analyze extended floor field cellular automaton models for evacuation dynamics of inhomogeneous pedestrian pairs which are coupled by asymmetric group interactions. Such pairs consist of a leader, who mainly determines the couple's motion and a follower, who has a defined tendency to follow the leader. Examples for such pairs are mother and child or two siblings of different age. We examine the system properties and compare them to the case of a homogeneous crowd. We find a strong impact on evacuation times for the regime of strong pair coupling due to the occurrence of a clogging phenomenon. In addition we obtain a non-trivial dependence of evacuation times on the followers' coupling to the static floor field, which carries the information of the shortest way to the exit location. In particular we find that systems with fully passive followers, who are solely coupled to their leaders, show lower evacuation times than homogeneous systems where all pedestrians have an equal tendency to move towards the exit. We compare the results of computer simulations with recently performed experiments.