Modeling pedestrian flow on multi-storey stairs considering turning behavior

摘要

Pedestrian flow both in normal and emergency situations (i.e. evacuation) has been widely studied by means of experiments as well as modeling methods. In this paper, an extended lattice-gas model is proposed to reproduce the pedestrian flow on multi-storey stairs during evacuations. Two-stage turning strategy is incorporated into the proposed model to simulate the 180 degrees turning behaviors of pedestrians on staircase mid-landings, and some movement characteristics such as walking preference and the probabilistic feature of turning are also considered in the extended model. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated on different evacuation scenarios with different basic parameters. The results show that turning behavior indeed influences the pedestrian flow under the emergency situation (i.e. the drift force in the lattice-gas model is large) while walking preference has a clear negative effect on the pedestrian flow at the normal situations (i.e. the drift force in the lattice-gas model is small). In addition, the results indicate that the entrance period has more effect on the flow performance when compared with the entrance rate. The study may be useful for understanding the flow phase of pedestrians on stairs and developing efficient strategy for crowd management during evacuations.