Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A series of experiments have been conducted on the inflow behavior of evacuating crowd into a stairway using 50 subjects to clarify principles dictating the directions and the speed of evacuees in a dense crowd. Through analysis of the bird’s-eye video images throughout each experiment, it has been found that there is a general tendency that individuals in a crowd try to follow antecessors rather than proceed simply toward the goal. General rules for the way-finding behaviour of individuals and the walking velocity dependence on the distance to antecessor have been proposed on the basis of these analyses.