Analysis of pedestrian evacuations: models and experiments

KUPERMAN, MARCELO N

Punta del Este

Workshop; Dynamics days latin america and the caribbean; 2018

Universidad de la República

When formulating the safety guidelines included in building codes the exit capacity in case of evacuation is among the critical parameters that must be considered. Most of the times, this capacity is consigned in terms of solely the exit times or equivalently the mean pedestrian flow rate through the designed exits. In this presentation we show that this measure may not provide an accuratecharacterization of an evacuating scenario and that an assessment of the fluctuations that occur during such process might provide a more sensitive and valuable information. For this reason, we suggest a simple way to partially assess the extent of information derived from these fluctuations on the basis of the statistical characterization of the time gaps between successive escapes through a door. We present  both numerical and experimental results that while delimiting the validity range of the previous proposal, show that in any case it is better than only the measurement of the mean exit capacity