Enhancing the Safety of Pedestrians during Emergency Egress

Abstract

It may be possible to use nonhuman biological entities for empirical study of pedestrian crowds under emergency conditions. A literature review is used to examine how the study of mass movement of organisms might enhance the safety of pedestrians during emergency egress. Recent findings from experiments with panicking ants are presented as examples, with two scenarios, of how such experiments can be used as a basis for the design of solutions to ensure safe egress of pedestrians in emergencies. Although the experiments are still in progress and it is too early to draw definitive conclusions with statistical significance, some preliminary results show promise in using ants to test models for pedestrian traffic in emergency conditions. Because of the lack of complementary data during emergency or panic-inducing situations, experiments such as these with ants provide alternate empirical ways to test whether designs developed by means of mathematical models may actually be efficacious and improve the safety of pedestrians.