In my thesis I studied the time that is needed for a successful room evacuation. I was interested in knowing how the number and layout of the obstacles impact the evacuation time.
With a computer program called Pathfinder I analyseda 20 meters long and 10 meters wide room with a 2 meters wide door in the middle of the longer wall. I added randomly distributed persons to the room and I simulated their evacuation. Then I moved the door to the left corner of the room and ran another simulation. In addition to the impact of door position on evacuation time, I also analysed the impact of the door width. I added a door that was 1-6 meters wide and ran an evacuation simulation.
I also analysed the impact of the location of the obstacle on the evacuation time. I did this by adding an obstacle that was 1-3 meters from the door. I then analysed the effect of the length of the obstacle on the evacuation time by changing the length of the obstacle. I was also interested in the impact of the number of obstacles on the evacuation time, so I added 1-4 obstacles to the room and ran an evacuation simulation.
It turned out that the position of the door in the room in question had no effect on the evacuation time. Unlike the position, the door width had an effect, but only up to a certain width. The distance between the door and the obstacle only affected evacuation time below a certain distance. Likewise, the length of the obstacle affects only over acertain length of the obstacle. I did not successfully analyse the impact of the number of obstacles, as the results were influenced by the change in the positioning of persons.
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