Design guidelines for crowd evacuation in a stadium for controlling evacuee accumulation and sequencing

Abstract

In the design of large‐scale sports facilities, architectural and fire‐service regulations are consulted to secure evacuation safety. However, these regulations define only the number, width, or amount of evacuation facilities, such as the path, exit, and stairs. These regulations not only limit the flexibility of the architectural design, but also not clarify that how evacuees should be secured or controlled under emergency situation. For this circumstance, we propose guidelines for the design and management of crowd evacuation by showing the process of an actual design project for a large‐scale 40 000‐seat stadium using a multi‐agent evacuation simulator. We mainly discuss three situations: (i) evacuation from the spectator stands, (ii) merging and accumulation around stairs, and (iii) evacuation to/on the ground. We clarify that most problems emerge from the accumulation of evacuees and the accumulation sequencing. We hence propose a design method and crowd management policy that avoid generation of a sequence of accumulations and while guiding on where accumulations should be generated.

Tracer observation of egress and way‐home crowd behavior at stadiums: From the perspective of crowd control in emergency evacuations

“…However, preventing the outflow from the premises being impeded by accumulation on the ground must also be considered. Minegishi et al 3 pointed out that even if there is sufficient space on a building site, it may not be possible to use the space effectively due to the positional relationships of the buildings' exits and stairs. Additionally, as an evacuation guidance method, keeping evacuees walking on sidewalks for some time has been proposed.…”

“…Nevertheless, according to the Guide, 2 crowd control during entry, exit, and evacuation should be planned with consideration of the characteristics of the Ex‐zone. From a similar viewpoint, Minegishi et al, 3 using multi‐agent evacuation simulation, introduced design and evacuation guidance considerations, emphasizing that crowd accidents tend to occur due to the chain of accumulation inside and outside the building during evacuations.…”

Flood-pedestrian simulator for modelling human response dynamics during flood-induced evacuation: Hillsborough stadium case study

“…This population size respects the highest safety limit for moving and queueing states at sports grounds (Still, 2019). Using a bigger population size would lead to extreme pedestrian congestion that impacts the movements of individual pedestrians, governed by the social force model (Minegishi and Takeichi, 2018). Hence, limiting the number to 4,080 pedestrians is also helpful to more realistically evaluate the net effect of pedestrian behaviours in relation to the changes in the state of floodwater variables during the evacuation process.…”

“…Hence, the navigation map has also a resolution of 1 m over which the pedestrian agents receive information about their destinations. The pedestrian model was set to gradually generate 4,080 pedestrian agents with a rate of 4 pedestrian agents per second starting at simulation time t = 0 min, to ensure safe evacuation timing for crowd evacuation planning in stadiums (Minegishi and Takeichi, 2018). Once a pedestrian agent is generated, it is assigned a random (initial) destination, to which they start to move to, between the three available destinations with an equal probability (south, east or north shown in Fig.…”

Flood–pedestrian simulator for modelling human response dynamics during flood-induced evacuation: Hillsborough stadium case study

“…In the lead-up to, and during, urban flooding, a number of underlying factors play a key role in determining flood risk to people, including people's physical, social, and mental factors and flood-related factors, i.e. floodwater extent, depth, and velocity (Ramsbottom et al, 2006;Milanesi et al, 2015;Arrighi et al, 2017;Musolino et al, 2020;Moftakhari et al, 2018;Rufat et al, 2020;Hamilton et al, 2020;Bernardini et al, 2021). Understanding and quantifying how the interplay between peopleand flood-related factors affects the flood risk to people is a desired way forward (Aerts et al, 2018).…”