Simulating the Dynamic Escape Process in Large Public Places

Ziyou Gao (), Yunchao Qu (), Xingang Li (), Jiancheng Long () and Hai-Jun Huang ()
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Ziyou Gao: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Yunchao Qu: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Xingang Li: School of Traffic and Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Jiancheng Long: School of Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China

Operations Research, 2014, vol. 62, issue 6, 1344-1357

Abstract: Pedestrian dynamics plays an important role in public facility design and evacuation management. During an escape process from a large public space, crowd behavior is a collection of pedestrian exit/route choice behavior, and movement behavior. Modelling such an escape process is an extremely complex challenge. In this paper, an integrated macro-micro approach is developed to simulate the escape process. An analysis of the simulation reveals the mechanisms of the formation of crowd congestion and flow distribution. At the macroscopic level, a mathematical model, based on the concept of the dynamic user optimal (DUO) criterion, is formulated to describe the pedestrian exit/route choice behavior. A method based on the fundamental diagram and point-queuing theory is developed to estimate the pedestrian escape time. At the microscopic level, a modified social force model is adopted to formulate pedestrians' dynamic movements during the escape process. A solution algorithm is proposed to solve the macro-micro integrated model and a series of experiments are carried out to validate the proposed model. The simulation results agree with the extracted experimental data. Finally, the integrated model and algorithm are used to simulate the escape process in a large public place. The proposed approach is able to generate the bandwagon effect, bottleneck effect, and route choice patterns.

Keywords: large public places; escape process; dynamic route choice; simulation; travel time estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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