Experimental Study on the Evacuation Behaviour of a Crowd Through Bottlenecks

Abstract

The growth of cities is very fast and is often very difficult for urban development. Pedestrian dynamics in this context are very important when designing a facility in terms of the safety, economics, and level of service to its users. The present study focuses on analysing the effect of density and width of a bottleneck on the behaviour of a crowd under emergency conditions. The inclusion of a buffer space for the dispersion of a crowd through a bottleneck is analysed. A relationship is established between total times, the flow and, a specific flow versus the width of a bottleneck. The formation of a dynamic layer was observed during capacity conditions due to the zipper effect. Among the five types of distributions, a semi-random distribution was the better fit for the headway data observed. It was observed that capacity increases in a stepwise manner as the width of a bottleneck increases, which can be attributed to the formation of dynamic lanes. The distance between these lanes is independent of the width of the bottleneck.

Keywords

• crowd
• total time
• time-gap
• headway
• dynamic lanes
• speed
• density