Impact of Pedestrians Bringing Along Their Bicycles on Evacuation Times of Subway Stations

Abstract

Crowd simulation is the field of computer science devoted to creating realistic simulations of large groups of people. One of the main applications of this field is performing evacuation studies to determine the safety of buildings or events. Lately, the use of the information from these simulations has increased for the determination of policies and for the decision whether and where to add additional escape facilities. Thus the results of the simulations should be realistic and reliable.

In this study, we propose a solution to two problems that we faced in a case study about the impact of pedestrians with bicycles in subway stations on evacuation times. The first problem is the complex behaviour of pedestrians near ticket gates and sets of escalators where always using the shortest path can lead to unrealistic behaviour. For this problem we propose a solution using a Decision Line and a metric to determine the best route. A set of five metrics is extensively compared to find the best metric. The second problem is the representation of pedestrians that bring large objects, like a bicycle, with them. Lastly, we successfully validate the framework by using a state-of-the-art validation and verification method.