Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
February 10, 2012, 14:15, Room GC B3 424 (click here for the map)
Emergency doors may be bottlenecks in the evacuation of a building. As neither the capacities of these doors are not known, nor details on the behaviour of people near these doors, large scale laboratory experiments have been performed. Using video images, we have identified the relation between the capacity and a number of factors, such as door width, population composition and stress level. In addition, the collected trajectory data have been used to calibrate our pedestrian simulation model Nomad and to compare the resulting behavioural parameters between evacuation conditions and normal conditions. To do this, an automated calibration procedure has been developed, which yields parameter estimates for individual pedestrians. The existing calibration procedure has been extended by including data from multiple pedestrians into a single estimate. The resulting parameter distributions provide insight into pedestrian behaviour. So far, dedicated parameter sets have been estimated for elderly, adults and children. It could be shown that not only the pedestrian behaviour changed between normal and evacuation conditions, but also between the different types of persons.