Simulation of adult-child matching behavior: A case study of primary school in Linyi city, China

Abstract

Pedestrian evacuation at the gate of primary school after school is always a tricky question bothering us. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of pedestrian evacuation at the gate of primary school, adult–child matching behavior after school is analyzed. We propose four adult–child matching strategies considering order or random of adults and children in the matching process. Fusing the matching strategy into a cellular automata (CA)-based pedestrian simulation model and taking the Linyi No. 40 middle school, China as the case study, the adult–child matching behavior is simulated on the platform of MATLAB software. The simulation results indicate that evacuation efficiency of the strategy (adults are orderly distributed in the first waiting area and children are orderly queuing up) reaches the maximum value among the four strategies. Effective matching strategies could reduce pedestrian conflicts. The randomly children and randomly adults are all the negative impacts for evacuation. Orderly evacuation process could reduce pedestrian conflicts. Compared with the randomly children, the effect on evacuation efficiency of the randomly adults is larger. A reasonable number of evacuated pedestrians at a time could improve the whole evacuation efficiency, and we advise the Linyi No. 40 middle school to evacuate three classes at a time.

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