Impacts of Anxiety in Building Fire and Smoke Evacuation: Modeling and Validation

Anxiety impairs evacuees' ability to select appropriate routes during building fire and smoke evacuations. Understanding anxiety is thus essential to provide proper guidance to evacuees. However, it is challenging to model how anxiety affects evacuees' decision-making process, and how to validate the resulting approach with very limited available data. In addition, mimicking anxiety in existing simulation packages is not easy because of the lack of appropriate features in simulators. This paper captures the impacts of anxiety on route choices and the interaction with other psychological features such as responses to guidance and herding. This is achieved by using an optimization framework where the number of planning steps and values of psychological parameters are affected by anxiety. To validate our approach, the levels of anxiety were manipulated by hazardous conditions and lengths of planning horizon are evaluated by comparing derived route choices against the data in virtual reality experiments. Impacts of anxiety on large crowds were also mimicked in Fire Dynamic Simulator + Evacuation with and without effective guidance. Testing results demonstrate that effective guidance help reduce negative impacts of anxiety on route choices.