Incentive-based experiments to characterize pedestrians’ evacuation behaviors under limited visibility

•Monetary incentive was used to mimic different emergency level during evacuation.•Monetary incentive has a significant influence on evacuation efficiency.•With increase in incentive level, evacuation time of the participants decreased.•Incentive level reduces randomness and hysteresis of participants’ route choice. Pedestrian evacuation dynamics under near zero or limited visibility conditions are usually different from normal evacuation conditions. In previous studies, the competitiveness of evacuees under limited visibility condition is mainly controlled by stimulating their physical and psychological states during evacuation, and the monetary incentive effect has not been investigated. This study aims to investigate the use of monetary incentive to mimic different emergency levels and the resulting effects in evacuation process under limited visibility condition. Two connected areas (7 m × 5 m) enclosed by an iron fence are set up for the single-exit evacuation experiment. A total of 18 evacuation experiments with 30 participants with limited vision were conducted. By controlling different amounts of monetary incentives as different emergency levels, the position of the connecting door in the middle or the edge of two fences and the opening of the exit of one room in two rooms were randomly selected as control variables to reduce the experimental behavior. The results show that the emergency level controlled by monetary incentive has a significant influence on evacuation efficiency. With the increase in incentive level, evacuation time of the participants generally decreased. The emergency level not only improved pedestrian’s walking speed by improving pedestrian’s urgency for evacuation, but also had a significant influence on pedestrian’s route choice. These results suggest that improving the incentive level can reduce the randomness and hysteresis of participants’ path and route selection decision. Findings of this study are valuable resources for proactive pedestrian crowd management under adverse conditions.