Social Relation Network and group behavior based on evacuation experiments

Social relation network and group behavior are critical in building evacuation. In this paper, six building evacuation experiments are designed and carried out to study the social relation and group behavior in evacuation, and to explore how social relation influence participants’ behavior when they can use elevators as egress. Evacuees are all from one undergraduate class with 30 students. The pre-existing social relations such as friends, girl and boy friends, classmates, and roommates are known. Experiments 1-3 are conducted to study the participants’ Social Relation Network (SRN) based on analyzing social network questionnaires. Results indicate that the crowd in evacuation form different small groups based on the pre-existing SRN, and the average influence degree of social relation affected on the leader-and-follower behavior in evacuation experiment is 78.3%. In addition, there are three kinds of evacuees in evacuation experiment, including leaders, followers and lonely evacuees. Experiments 4-6 are carried out to study how social relation, elevator egress and evacuation experience influence their behavior in evacuation. Participants are divided into pairs based on their SRN and the Mutual Believed Degree (MBD) method. It is found that social relation can enhance participants’ speeds (participants are young students), and influence their decision making on selecting stairs or elevators for evacuation. Their speeds follow the Normal Distribution N(1.16, 0.18). Several interesting phenomena are observed in the experiments, such as redirection and overtaking. In addition, if the elevators cannot be properly used, evacuation will be delayed.