Development of an evacuation model considering the impact of stress variation on evacuees under fire emergency

Abstract When evacuees directly confront a life-endangering situation in a fire accident, the raised stress created by the physical threat of fire tends to affect evacuees' escape behaviours (i.e., shifting from a calm exit mannerism to a stressful escape behaviour). This behavioural phenomenon inevitably affects crowd movement patterns and subsequently, the overall evacuation characteristics. However, limited works address the impact of stress variation on evacuees under the pressure of a fire emergency. In this paper, we propose an evacuation model to numerically determine the stress level of evacuees according to their specific surrounding environment. Hence, it enables evacuees to perceive the fire risk and acts in response to the fire hazard. Rather than solely placing emphasis on representing the physical movement of evacuees only, as are the common approach used in previous works, this study focuses on the influence of stress factor on the crowd evacuation performance. Our proposed model contributes to a better understanding of the crowd evacuation dynamics by investigating the effect of stress variation on evacuees, which provides an additional aspect of insight to existing evacuation frameworks.