Child behavior during evacuation under non-emergency situations: Experimental and simulation results

Child behavior during evacuation, as a critical problem that has not been fully explored and understood, is investigated in this paper, through conducting a group of experiments and developing a cellular automaton (CA) model. The video recordings have revealed several typical patterns of child behavior related to distance, obstacle and congestion level. The group behavior, as well as the waiting and playing behavior in a group, have been observed. Then, a CA model is proposed to describe the movement of children with and without group behavior. Through numerical simulations, the ability of the model to reproduce the behavior observed in the experiments is verified. The results also show that the child group behavior has significant negative effect on evacuation time. This study helps to improve the evacuation strategy for children, the internal layout and exit arrangement for buildings where many children congregate.