The effect of dedicated exit on the evacuation of heterogeneous pedestrians

A social force model is proposed in this paper to study the effect of dedicated exit on the evacuation of heterogeneous pedestrians in a public place. In this model, pedestrians are divided into two groups—powerful pedestrians and weak pedestrians, who have different walking abilities. Several exit design schemes are compared through simulations in a regular room. The main results are: (1) Building a new exit as weak group’s dedicated exit can simultaneously reduce each group’s average evacuation time and maximum evacuation time. (2) Reconstructing an existing ordinary exit as weak group’s dedicated exit can reduce weak pedestrians’ average evacuation time but may increase their maximum evacuation time. (3) If the total number of exits is fixed, compared with the non-dedicated exit scheme, the scheme which designs dedicated exits for each group separately may reduce weak group’s evacuation speed. (4) If the sum of widths of all the exits is fixed, the ratio of width between the dedicated exit and the ordinary exit has a significant effect on each group’s evacuation. The optimal ratio depends on the proportion of weak pedestrians. Finally, a real-world example which involves the evacuation issue in a waiting hall with security checkpoints is used to show the effectiveness of women-only exits in improving the crowd evacuation efficiency. Particularly, it is found that a suitable women-only exit scheme can achieve a win-win situation for both male pedestrians and female pedestrians in the crowd evacuation.