LabCUBEegress: a laboratory for a selective study of people’s movement and human behaviour during egress situations

Qualitative and quantitative studies of people's movement and behaviour during egress situations are fundamental in order to characterize the interrelationships between people and the environment and, eventually, to i m prove the effectiveness of the design and management of an egress system. The complexity of the evacuation process is generally studied by performing evacuation drills and controlled experiments. Evacuation drills permit to analyse the whole evacuation process but they are not usually replicated in the same building. Hence, the data collection is possible for a single scenario. On the other hand, controlled experiments allow to focus the study on one or few types of interactions and to repeat the analyses several times for the same scenario in order to collect representative data on movement or behavioural patterns. In order to perform experiments aimed at studying people-people and people-environment interrelationships a portable laboratory, LabCUBEegress, has been conceived and realized. LabCUBEegress is a structure with a flexible configuration which can be customised to create different layouts and to reproduce different parts of an egress system. LabCUBEegress has been used in different set of experiments aimed at studying the effects of exit signs on people's path choice, the movement of people in paths with different widths, and the effects of flows from opposite directions at a gap. In this paper LabCUBEegress is presented along with the results obtained from the study of the effects of exit signs on people's path choice at a T-intersection. The results show that the presence of a left exit sign at a T-intersection influenced people's path choice in both individuai and group experiments, with a stronger intluence in individuai experiments. The proportion of people that selected the left path increased significantly if compared with the scenarios without exit signs.