Method of Bottleneck Identification and Evaluation During Crowd Evacuation Process

Accidents and natural disasters such as fire and earthquakes post more and more threats to the transportation infrastructures. Under such circumstance, the evacuation process for the crowded pedestrians in these infrastructures may be affected by the facility failure, resulting in partially damaged evacuation network, which at last forms bottlenecks and decreases the evacuation efficiency. Thus to improve the safety and comfortable level of crowd evacuation in transportation infrastructures, a new method of bottleneck identification and evaluation for evacuation network is proposed. The proposed method takes into account the facility failure induced crowd redistribution and explores the structure importance of the evacuation network component. The method of bottleneck identification is also applicable to other similar transportation networks.