Emergency exits as bottlenecks in escape routes are important for designing traffic facilities. Particularly, the capacity estimation is a crucial performance criterion for assessment of pedestrians’ safety in built environments. For this reason, several studies were performed during the last decades which focus on the quantification of movement through corridors and bottlenecks. These studies were usually conducted with populations of homogeneous characteristics to reduce influencing variables and for reasons of practicability. Studies which consider heterogeneous characteristics in performance parameters are rarely available. In response and to reduce this lack of data a series of well-controlled large-scale movement studies considering pedestrians using different types of wheelchairs was carried out. As a result it is shown that the empirical relations ρ¯(v¯) and Js¯(ρ¯) are strongly affected by the presence of participants with visible disabilities (such as wheelchair users). We observed an adaption of the overall movement speeds to the movement speeds of participants using a wheelchair, even for low densities and free flow scenarios. Flow and movement speed are in a complex relation and do not depend on density only. In our studies, the concept of specific flow fits for the nondisabled subpopulation but it is not valid for scenario considering wheelchair users in the population.

Understanding movement in heterogeneous groups is important for a meaningful evaluation of evacuation prediction and for a proper design of buildings. The understanding of interactions and influencing factors in heterogeneous groups on key performance figures is fundamental for a safe design. This contribution presents results of experimental studies on movement of a crowd through a bottleneck involving participants with and without disabilities. High precise trajectories of the attendees extracted from video recordings were used to calculate density and velocity of the participants. Besides the well-established fundamental diagram new insights into the individual relation between density and velocity are discussed. A complex structure and considerate behaviour in movement implicates a strong influence of the heterogeneity on key performance values of safe movement.

Summary To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egress data describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typically based to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupants who might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the building populations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: with impairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there will be an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. For safe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress data considering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled a series of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activities in the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presenting data obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontal movement of participants with physical‐, cognitive‐, or age‐related disabilities. The aim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and key factors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could be used to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design.

Summary The importance of empirical relations to quantify the movement of pedestrians through a facility has increased during the last decades since performance‐based design methods became more common. Bottlenecks are of special interest because of their importance for egress routes and as they result in a reduced capacity. The empirical relations as the density‐dependent movement speed or flow rate were derived by studies under laboratory conditions, which were usually conducted with populations of homogeneous characteristics for better control of influencing variables. If individual characteristics of a crowd become more heterogeneous, individuals were forced to adapt their individual movement and control individual manoeuvring. These unintended interactions lead to a different shape of the fundamental empirical relations. Here, we present results from a movement study under well‐controlled boundary conditions in which participants with and without different characteristics of disabilities participated. To consider the effect of different heterogeneities on the capacity of a facility, fundamental diagrams are generated using the Voronoi method. If participants with visible disabilities (such as using assistive devices) are part of a crowd, significant differences relating to the shape of the empirical relations and the capacities are found. This indicates that the heterogeneity of a population leads to an increased interpersonal interaction which results in influenced movement characteristics.