2017/12/06 by Alexandre Nicolas, Nicolas, Alexandre
Engineering · #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Traffic control and management #Urban Design and Spatial Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.02067
openalex publication_date 2017/12/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
For safety reasons, it is important that the design of buildings and public facilities comply with the guidelines compiled in building codes.The latter are often premised on the concept of exit capacity, i.e., the mean pedestrian flow rate through a bottleneck (at congestion). Here, we argue that one should duly take into account the evacuation time fluctuations when devising these guidelines. This is particularly true when the narrowing isabrupt and the crowd may behave competitively. We suggest a simple way to assess the extent of (part of) these fluctuations on the basis of the statistics of time gaps between successive escapes through the consideredbottleneck, which in practice could be garnered by analysing recordings of future real evacuations or, perhaps, realistic drills (in the limits of what is ethically possible). We briefly present a test of the proposed strategy using a cellular automaton model and confirm its validity under some conditions, but alsodisclose some of its limitations. In particular, it may severely underestimate fluctuations in the presence of strong correlations in the pedestrians' behaviours(while still performing better than only the mean capacity).