Modeling the pedestrian's movement and simulating evacuation dynamics on stairs

This paper presents an enhanced social force model to describe the pedestrian's movement and evacuation dynamics on stairs. Compared with original models that described the pedestrian's planar motion, our model introduces some mechanisms of the staircase movement, such as the influence of staircase geometry, the restriction of the step size and the optimal velocity selection. The body shape of each pedestrian is regarded as a set of three circles to precisely quantify the movement. In addition, the rotation dynamics are included into the model to describe the congestion effect. The improved model can obtain individual velocity under different staircase geometries and the flow characteristics of the evacuation dynamics. Some empirical data and a series of observations captured in two subway stations in Beijing are applied to study the characteristics and further validate the model. The results show that our model performs well consistent with the observed data. At last, simulations are implemented to find the solutions of estimating the evacuation time and evaluating the capacity of stair.