Evacuation Assistance for a Sports Arena Using a Macroscopic Network Model

Abstract

The macroscopic network model for pedestrians described in this paper is part of the German research project Hermes. The purpose of Hermes is the development of an evacuation assistant. Key outputs of the network model are travel (evacuation) times, identification of bottlenecks, pointing out alternative escape routes and/or optimization of escape route usage. The model uses Dynamic User Equilibrium (DUE) to analyse the network. This way it is able to show pedestrian flow with transient congestion effects, leading to time-varying route choice during an evacuation. The results can be calculated before or during an emergency case. The calculation time is much shorter and the results can be shown quicker than with a common microsimulation movie or animation. But arguably a microsimulation can be more detailed and for absolute information like evacuation time more conventional.