Analyzing floor-stair merging flow based on experiments and simulation*

Abstract

In most situations, staircase is the only egress to evacuate from high-rise buildings. The merging flow on the stair landing has a great influence on the evacuation efficiency. In this paper, we develop an improved cellular automaton model to describe the merging behavior, and the model is validated by a series of real experiments. It is found that the flow rate of simulation results is similar to the drills, which means that the improved model is reasonable and can be used to describe the merging behavior on stairs. Furthermore, some scenarios with different door locations and building floor numbers are simulated by the model. The results show that (i) the best door location is next to the upward staircase; (ii) the total evacuation time and the building floor number are linearly related to each other; (iii) the pedestrians on upper floors have a negative influence on the evacuation flow rate.

An extended social force model on unidirectional flow considering psychological and behavioral impacts of hazard source

“…Since their introduction, these simulation models have been constantly modified and improved by the research community. These researches include focuses on the bottlenecks, [6] the stairways, [7] the rescuer, [8] the signs, [9] the direction and speed strategies, [10] the surrounding crowd, [11] the socio-cultural backgrounds, [12] etc. Yue et al [13] used the cellular automaton approach and discovered that the pedestrians keep a certain spatial distance from the boundaries of walkway, that they prefer to choose a wider movement aisle in classroom, and that the evacuation time is dominated by the narrowest one of series-connected bottlenecks.…”

Simulation of crowd dynamics in pedestrian evacuation concerning panic contagion: A cellular automaton approach

“…They have used evacuation accidents data to analyze the stampede revolving around the pilgrims to Mecca, [4] the phenomenon of "people waves" in the World Cup auditorium, [5] the "9.11" incident. [6][7][8][9] Evacuation experiments in different scenarios such as classrooms, [10][11][12] corridors, [13][14][15][16] bottlenecks, [17][18][19] and invisible environments [20][21][22] were also carried out through experiments. Animals, including mice, [23] ants, [24] sheep [25] were also used successfully in some experiments to investigate the dynamic characteristics of crowd evacuation.…”