Establishing the Proper Seating Arrangement in Elevated Lecture Halls for a Faster Evacuation Process

As time is crucial in the human evacuation process during an emergency situation, several aspects related to how the humans involved in such a process act have been studied over the time, underlying that the humans' behavior is rather unpredictable and depends on social background, emotions, the degree of familiarity with the environment, age, gender, and so on. On the other hand, it has been determined that the characteristics of the environment are important in such situations as they may facilitate a shorter evacuation time. It has been shown that exits characteristics, such as width or their number, have a positive direct impact on the evacuation time. In this context, this paper aims to analyze another environmental aspect, namely, the seat arrangement, and to determine how the seats should be placed in order to reduce the evacuation time for a given configuration of the doors. On this purpose, an elevated lecture hall with two exits has been chosen, as it represents one of the most populated places within the public buildings, characterized not only by a high population density but also by a limited capacity to escape. A case study has been conducted using 97 human subjects and an agent-based model has been created considering their individual characteristics. The model has been simulated on eight different seat arrangements for 15 different positions on the two exit-doors. As a result, the proper seating arrangement for each of the 15 exit-door positions has been presented along with the study's limitations.