Assessing evacuation performance of pedestrians within narrow seated spaces

Abstract

Pedestrian movement behaviors within seated areas are of great importance for evacuation from multi-obstacle buildings such as stadiums, cinemas and classrooms. In this study, we conducted a series of experiments in a built channel to understand pedestrians’ movement within narrow seated areas. The channel was equipped with moveable chairs to simulate seated areas. We considered the effects of the channel width and seat arrangement. Based on collected pedestrians’ movement trajectories, we mainly discussed the difference of instantaneous velocity in individual experiment and space–time relations of pedestrians in group experiment. The results found that the evacuation performance was influenced by the combination effect of the channel width and seat arrangement, particularly when the channel was narrow (width ≤0.65 m in this study). The seat obstacles located back-space or pushed backward contributed to large evacuation time, obvious fluctuations of the velocities and large headway. Pedestrians were strongly encouraged to push forward their seats before starting to evacuation, which was very beneficial to their following pedestrians.