Enhancing the Safety of Pedestrians During Emergency Egress Can We Learn from Biological Entities?

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 ..