Research On Pedestrian Evacuation Behaviors Under Information Guidance

Crowd evacuation under various emergencies,such as fire,electricity blackouts and terrorist attack,is often accompanied by darkness,smoke,and scream,resulting in limited view and hearing range of pedestrians.Under such circumstances,negative and incorrect information guidance may seriously interfere with the behaviors of individuals.Pedestrians become disoriented and fall into panic,which can easily lead to the undesired consequences,such as blocking,stampeding,and even trampling.That is to say,positive and correct information guidance plays an important role in the crowd emergency evacuation.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to carry out research on crowd behaviors,evolution laws and cooperation mechanisms under information guidance.Aiming at the aforementioned issues,in this thesis,evacuation behaviors under information guidance related to two types of pedestrians,i.e.crowd in indoor areas and bi-directional pedestrian flows in corridors,are explored respectively.Main contents of the research on crowd evacuation behaviors in indoor areas under information guidance are as follows:1.With consideration of congestion disutility,a modified cell transmission model is introduced to formulate the crowd behaviors in the complete-information environment.2.A cell transmission model considering two walking characteristics,i.e.following behaviors and moving along the walls,is proposed to imitate the crowd behaviors in the incomplete-information environment.Meanwhile,the reliability of the model is verified by the experiment data in the literature.3.Pedestrian evacuation behaviors involved in two forms of information guidance,i.e.dynamic information guidance of facilities and dynamic informationguidance of leaders,are investigated.Under the dynamic guidance of facilities,subtle effects of the information source position and propagation velocity on the evacuation efficiency,are discussed;under the dynamic guidance of leaders,subtle effects of the leader distribution and the degree of pedestrian rationality on the evacuation efficiency,are studied.Main contents of the research on bi-directional pedestrian flows evacuation behaviors in corridors under information guidance are as follows:1.An extended cell transmission model is developed to simulate the behaviors of bi-directional pedestrian flows in corridors.In the model,three walking preferences of pedestrians are considered,including walking on the right-hand side,following front people in the same direction,and avoiding conflicts with ones in the opposite direction.Moreover,the reliability of the model is verified by the experiment data in the literature.2.A method,which is specially adapted to the mesoscopic model,is developed to achieve a periodic boundary condition simulation.3.Through sensibility analysis,main parameters involved in the model that can significantly affect the walking efficiency of bi-direction pedestrian flows,are found.In short,our work would lay the groundwork,at the strategy and operational levels,for route planning and finding meaningful locations for information guidance in pedestrian facilities.