Abstract
Upon exiting buildings, theatres, and stadiums, which house a great number of people, egress points can act as bottlenecks, resulting in crowded exits and decreased flows. Most studies investigating flow have been conducted in either narrow bottlenecks (doors) or funnel shape bottlenecks, with the latter investigating bottlenecks placed in the middle of the walkway. This study investigates, for the first time, crowd flow through funnel-shaped bottlenecks placed in the corner of the walkway and makes comparisons with similar bottlenecks of the same length, entrance and exit width placed in the middle of the walkway. The entry width and exit width of the bottlenecks were 3 m and 1 m respectively, with lengths varying from 1 m to 4 m; they continued into a 10 m corridor. Ninety-four participants of various ages were observed moving through each of the configurations. The results indicated that using funnel-shaped bottlenecks in the middle of the walkway increased the flow rate significantly compared to the corner in bottlenecks with 2 m and 3 m lengths. This is contrary to what some other researchers have found for narrow bottlenecks placed in the middle and corner of a wall, although it is recognised that the configuration of funnel-shaped bottlenecks makes the comparison more complex and further work is required in this area. Notwithstanding these results are considered valuable for consideration when designing egress points and corridors in complex buildings such as metro and train stations.
Highlights
The study of pedestrian movement and, in particular, an understanding of the role that bottlenecks play in emergency and non-emergency evacuation of a crowd is becoming more important as buildings and structures become more complex and house more and more people
The results indicated that the flow rate through the centrally located exit point was higher than that through the corner exit point, but that the difference in flow rates decreased as the width of the exit points increased
In a similar story to investigate the effect of changing the narrow bottlenecks to funnelshaped bottlenecks on crowd evacuation, Oh and Park [28] explored the evacuation of mice and simulated that to extract crowd evacuation; they found that by changing the configuration from narrow bottlenecks to funnel-shaped bottlenecks, the efficiency of the bottleneck increased
Summary
The study of pedestrian movement and, in particular, an understanding of the role that bottlenecks play in emergency and non-emergency evacuation of a crowd is becoming more important as buildings and structures become more complex and house more and more people. Many researchers have explored movement via controlled experiments [3,4,5], evacuation drills [6,7], by analysing actual footage of everyday pedestrian circulation [8,9], computer simulation and modelling [10,11], in virtual reality [12,13], and by studying non-human organisms [14,15,16] Of these methods, experimental investigation of crowd movement has proven to be the most popular, since it enables the conditions and geometries of the building components to be controlled [17]
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