Traffic Flow of Merging Pedestrian Crowds: How Architectural Design Affects Collective Movement Efficiency

Abstract

The need for developing reliable and rigorous models that can replicate and make predictions of pedestrian crowd evacuations has necessitated an understanding of the impact of architecture on individuals’ interactions with their surroundings and the behavioral rules that govern their movements. Due to the challenges of providing such behavioral data from natural evacuations and previous crowd incidents, simulation-based and laboratory-based evacuation experiments have recently been employed as innovative data-provision approaches to study crowd behavior notably under emergency conditions. This study explores pioneer experiments of emergency escape with a view to investigating the relationship between spatial constraints and collective behavior of human crowds. Here, we make use of two types of empirical and analytical data obtained from a large number of well-controlled laboratory and evacuation simulation experiments. This study presents findings corresponding to how and to what extent the presence of conflicting layouts in egress areas, particularly merging corridors, affect the collective motion of pedestrians. The focus of attention will be on measures of performance at macroscopic level derived from both observations. Our results suggested that the movement patterns observed in both types of experiments are sensitive to the angle between the two merging streams and the symmetry/asymmetry of the merging layouts, with symmetric layouts almost invariably outperforming the asymmetric counterparts. Also, within each symmetry/asymmetry structural type, the angle at which the flows combined with each other affected the efficiency of discharge. Our findings provide further evidence as to the significant role of the architectural structure of the movement area in facilitating the traffic flow of heavy crowds of pedestrians.

Optimization of Building Exit Layout: Combining Exit Decisions of Evacuees

“…Second, two symmetric exits on the same wall, two exits locate near different corners on the adjacent walls and two opposite exits locate near the corner or in the middle of the parallel walls performed well during urgent evacuations under their respective conditions. Finally, in some particular configurations, an even symmetry is found more efficient than an asymmetric distribution of exits, which is consistent with the results in [59,60].…”

Mapping the knowledge domain of soft computing applications for emergency evacuation studies: A scientometric analysis and critical review

“…In addition, as the top 2 % scholar in the areas of Traffic and Transport Engineering based on the WOS, Majid Sarvi is another core author of an important research group, including the researchers he supervised (Alhawsawi, 2021;Haghani, 2017;Li, 2020;Shahhoseini, 2018). His recent work extended the application of AI approaches in large-scale mixed traffic evacuation and crowd dynamic modelling and simulation.…”

Effect of a static pedestrian as an exit obstacle on evacuation

“…In the pedestrian field, researchers have spent a lot of time on the influence of asymmetric structure on pedestrian movement, such as space configuration on dynamics of two merging flows, [35] the effect of symmetry exits layout on evaluation efficiency, [36,37] etc. Similarly, it is found that the asymmetric structure of obstacles in the front of the exit affects the overall evacuation efficiency, such as reducing conflicts at the exit, [38] increasing the escape speed (reducing the tangential momentum), [20] and blocking pedestrians moving.…”