Abstract
An evacuation exercise was conducted at a teaching and research institute of Lisbon University, where 64 first year graduate students participated. Videos were recorded during the exercise in order to analyze the students’ behavior. At the end of the activity students answered a questionnaire. In addition, computer simulations of the evacuation were carried out to compare the theoretical behavior with the experimental one. The results show that although about 90% of the students have participated in drills, some had an inappropriate behavior during the evacuation, such as stopping or walking too slowly. Simulation results show that these kinds of behavior delayed the evacuation by about 5 s. Furthermore, the comparison between experimental results and simulations has highlighted the necessity of studying and developing models capable of reproducing, to some extent, those behaviors considered to be incorrect during an evacuation. These kinds of models might be used to assess the evacuation time considering also the level of training of the population.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the IGOT students that participated in the exercise, and the professors who allowed this experiment in their classrooms and even kindly recorded the videos. The authors also would like to thank Gabriele Bulian (University of Trieste) for the useful suggestions to the paper. The research activity of the third author has been carried out in the framework of his Ph.D. program at University of Trieste (Ph.D. scholarship G/3-Cycle XXX financed by MIUR “Progetto Giovani Ricercatori” through University of Trieste).
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Santos, A., Queirós, M., Montecchiari, G. (2018). Evacuation Exercises and Simulations Toward Improving Safety at Public Buildings. In: Otjacques, B., Hitzelberger, P., Naumann, S., Wohlgemuth, V. (eds) From Science to Society. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65687-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65687-8_3
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