Cellular automaton modeling of pedestrian movement behavior on an escalator

As a convenient passenger transit facility between floors with different heights, escalators have been extensively used in shopping malls, metro stations, airport terminals, etc. Compared with other vertical transit facilities including stairs and elevators, escalators usually have large transit capacity. It is expected to reduce pedestrian traveling time and thus improve the quality of pedestrian’s experiences especially in jamming conditions. However, it is noticed that pedestrians may present different movement patterns, e.g., queuing on each step of the escalator, walking on the left-side and meanwhile standing on the right-side of the escalator. These different patterns affect the actual escalator traffic volume and finally the passenger spatiotemporal distribution in different built environments. Thus, in the present study, a microscopic cellular automaton(CA) simulation model considering pedestrian movement behavior on escalators is built. Simulations are performed considering different pedestrian movement speeds, queuing modes, and segregation on escalators with different escalator speeds.The actual escalator capacities under different pedestrian movement patterns are investigated. It is found that walking on escalators will not always benefit escalator transit volume improvement, especially in jamming conditions.

Game theory model of exit selection in pedestrian evacuation considering visual range and choice firmness

Exit choice is one of the most important pedestrian behaviors during evacuation.Distance to the exit is a generally recognized factor influencing expected moving time to the exit.Visual range determines how much information a pedestrian can perceive,thus the number of pedestrians within the visual field can be used to estimate waiting time at the exit.Besides,the choice firmness that reflects the degree to which a pedestrian would persist in his/her previous choice of exit is proposed.By integrating game theory into a cellular automata simulation framework,the pedestrian exit choice mechanism is investigated and explicitly modeled in this paper.A systematic analysis of the key factors influencing pedestrian evacuation is conducted,including visual radius and choice firmness of a pedestrian,initial crowd distribution of the room,exit layout as well as exit width.It is found that low choice firmness level can lead to unnatural pedestrian behavior such as wandering,which is adverse to evacuation.The longer the pedestrian's visual radius,the earlier the pedestrian can determine his/her final selection of the exit.Compared with the scenario where the pedestrians are randomly distributed,pedestrians clustered together in a corner of the room lead to high crowd density and imbalanced use of exits.Furthermore,the exit layout and exit width also have a certain influence on pedestrian evacuation process.The results of this paper may be of benefit to the formulation of behavioral rules in other pedestrian simulation models.