Abstract
Due to the highly developed rail transit over the past decades, the phenomena of complex individual self-organized behaviors and mass crowd dynamics have become a great concern in the train station. In order to understand passengers’ walking-edge effect and analyze the relationship between the layout and sustainable service abilities of the train station, a heuristics-based social force model is proposed to elaborate the crowd dynamics. Several evacuation scenarios are implemented to describe the walking-edge effect in a train station with the evacuation efficiency, pedestrian flow, and crowd density map. The results show that decentralizing crowd flow can significantly increase the evacuation efficiency in different scenarios. When the exits are far away from the central axis of the railway station, the walking-edge effect has little influence on the evacuation efficiency. Obstacles can guide the movement of passengers by channelizing pedestrian flows. In addition, a wider side exit of the funnel-shaped corridors can promote walking-edge effect and decrease the pressure among a congested crowd. Besides providing a modified social force model with considering walking-edge effect, several suggestions are put forward for managers and architects of the train station in designing sustainable layouts.
Highlights
Over the past decade, traveling demands have increased rapidly due to world population growth [1]
Based on the heuristics-based social force model mentioned in Section 2 considering walking-edge effect, different train station hall SSs are simulated
In the situation of considering walking-edge effect, the results in Section 3 suggest that it is more beneficial to pedestrian movement when the obstacle is closer to the main exit
Summary
Over the past decade, traveling demands have increased rapidly due to world population growth [1]. Mass gathering frequently appears in major train stations. Crowd flows through the train station are typically characterized by high density and rapid movement. Several natural or man-made disasters have led to the crowd stampede in some major train stations, resulting in property losses and casualties [4]. On 29 September 2017, a human stampede event occurred at the Elphinstone train station in Mumbai, India, where 39 people were injured and 23 people died [5]. In May 2012, at a railway station in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, a massive evacuation caused 17 casualties [6]. All the emergency events draw attention to the need for developing protocols for crowd management and sustainable safety design of train stations
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