Simulation of pedestrian evacuation with asymmetrical pedestrian layout

Abstract

Simulation of pedestrian evacuation from a room with multi-exit and asymmetrical pedestrian layout is presented based on an improved dynamic parameter model in this paper. The computation and the count-area of imaginary distance are improved based on the Max-Min evacuation path selection of actual and imaginary distance in order to reduce evacuation imbalance caused by the asymmetry of pedestrian layout. An imbalance coefficient is introduced to describe the asymmetry of pedestrian layout. The effects of pedestrian layout asymmetry on the evacuation time are analyzed respectively from fixed and unfixed pedestrian initialization site. The simulation results of the improved and original models are compared and analyzed, and the improved model can effectively reduce evacuation imbalance. Simulation results show that under normal evacuation condition with considerring reasonable pedestrian and jam around exits, evacuation time is hardly affected by pedestrian and exit layout and depends mainly on cognition coefficient, total width of exits and pedestrian initialization amount.

Exit selection strategy in pedestrian evacuation simulation with multi-exits

“…Pedestrian evacuation with asymmetrical pedestrian layout is studied in Ref. [39], in which the waiting distance is introduced and the imbalance coefficient is discussed from the viewpoint of the utilization of exits. The jam count-area only includes a triangle or semi-circle before an exit in Ref.…”

“…The jam countarea includes the area between the pedestrian and the exit in Ref. [39] (see Fig. 16(b)).…”

“…16(b)). The jam count-area of an imaginary distance is fixed ahead and the evacuation room is divided with a no-counting area [38] or double-counting area [39] in the computation of the shortest estimated distance. In order to realize the dynamic variation of the jam count-area with the density changing, the procedure of step-by-step expending and the concept of a jam area layer are introduced in the computation of the shortest estimated distance, in which the pedestrian movement room is completely partitioned into different subareas without a double-counting area and a no-counting area.…”

“…[36] A direction visual field was introduced in the floor field model to simulate pedestrian evacuation from a room with multi-exits, which predicted the propagation of pedestrian flow along some directions in the evacuation. [37] The pedestrian evacuations with asymmetrical exits and pedestrian layout were simulated using a dynamic parameter model, [38,39] in which the mechanism of max-min evacuation path selection, jam cognition coefficient, and imbalance coefficient were presented.…”

“…[42] A heterogeneous lattice gas model was developed to simulate emergency evacuation, in which the concepts of local population density and exit crowded degree were introduced. [43] In these original or improved models mentioned above, researches were focused on the pedestrian movement mechanism, [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] pedestrian route choice, [2,7,44,45] pedestrian crowd, [3,4] pedestrian occupying size, [17,18] pedestrian walking preferences, [19][20][21] force effects in a crowd, [18,[22][23][24][25][26] evacuation with adverse condition [7,[27][28][29][30][31] and with obstacles, [32][33][34]45,46] evacuation with multi-exits [14,32,33,[37][38][39]47] and the effect of the surroundings on the dynamic. ...…”