Understanding the Impact of Social Interactions and Collective Behaviour Among Evacuees

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The fire is able to cause enormous damaging consequences, especially in buildings occupied by many people, increasing the cost of the losses in both, human and economy. For that reason, during the last decades, numerous researches have been carried out about emergency evacuations and how they rely upon the social interactions between the evacuees. Nonetheless, not much is known about when and how they do so. This thesis is based on a specific case study of an emergency drill carried out in a sports centre. The aim of the thesis is to comprehend the different social interactions and collective behaviour that might affect the evacuees. On the other hand, the final part of the thesis presents different evacuation model simulations in order to figure out up until which level a specific software is able to perform the collective behaviour of the evacuees and how. The different studies of the impact of social interaction are going to be analysed by one quantitative method that already has been used in previous studies. With the method proposed, two different situations are going to be analysed: the time to response to the emergency and the time to exit. Later on, the comparison between the results obtained in the model simulation and the real results would be presented.