Experimental study of architectural adjustments on pedestrian flow features at bottlenecks

Abstract

Crowd dynamics has been attracting more and more attention in the past decades because of the serious accidents occurred within pedestrian crowds, especially near bottlenecks. In this paper, pedestrian flow features at bottlenecks, i.e. room exits, are investigated with human-experiments considering varying door sizes and locations. The measure of evacuation time all indicated that lager door widths showed higher egress efficiency. Our analyses showed that the time lapses between two successive pedestrians displayed heavy-tailed distribution in all the scenarios studied. Meanwhile, regardless of the physical setups, faster flow rate and greater burst sizes with the increasing door width were..