Abstract
Rapid exploitation of city underground space has led to the development of increasingly more underground slender-shape infrastructure like pedestrian tunnels, concourses, subway walkways, underground shopping streets, etc. Pedestrian evacuation in those public places in case of emergency can be disastrous if not properly guided. Therefore, it is important to understand how to enhance the evacuation efficiency through proper active guidance. In this study, we propose a digital twin based guiding system for pedestrian emergency evacuation inside a slender-shape infrastructure, aiming at enhancing the overall evacuation efficiency. Composition and calibration process of the guiding system are described, and a cellular automata based model is established to serve as the digital twin model. Two guidance strategies, namely traditional fixed guidance and smart guidance, are adopted by the digital twin to generate guidance instructions. A smart guidance strategy using a semi-empirical approach is proposed based on the understanding of the free movement and congested movement of pedestrian flow. Systems under different guiding strategies are compared and discussed over their effectiveness to promote excavation efficiency in different pedestrian population distribution settings. The simulation results show that a system under smart guidance tends to have shorter evacuation time (up to 23.8% time saving) and performs with more stability for pedestrian evacuations over the traditional fixed guided systems. The study provides insight for potential real applications of a similar kind.
Highlights
Rapid exploitation of city underground space has led to the development of increasingly more underground infrastructure characterized by their slender shape, like pedestrian tunnels, concourses, subway walkways, underground shopping streets, underpasses, subway station platforms, etc
The above demonstration illustrates that the introduction of the smart guidance helps to more scientifically divide people to evacuate through respective gates so that crowds tends to dissipate simultaneously and more evacuation capacity is reached, resulting in shorter total evacuation time and improved safety for pedestrians collectively
Aiming at improving the overall evacuation efficiency, a digital twin based framework to cope with emergency evacuation inside slender-shape infrastructure is proposed
Summary
Rapid exploitation of city underground space has led to the development of increasingly more underground infrastructure characterized by their slender shape, like pedestrian tunnels, concourses, subway walkways, underground shopping streets, underpasses, subway station platforms, etc. The establishment of CPS can greatly improve the way that complex systems can be interpreted to support their maintenance, enabling a new simulation approach, which benefit from the ubiquitous connectivity in manufacturing systems to offer a real-time synchronization between the physical asset and its digital representation. This simulation approach is generally referred to as the elaboration of Digital Twins (DT) [36]. The study offers insights over the potential improvement of introducing active guidance strategies in pedestrian emergency evacuations, which is meaningful for potential real world applications
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