Comparative Investigation of the Dynamic Simulation of Foot Traffic Flow

Evaluation and optimization of emergency route systems can be accomplished with different engineering methods. These methods are based on two different principles: the macroscopic and the microscopic approach. Both allow forecasting of evacuation times for various settings. In the work presented simple settings are investigated, consisting of rooms, corridor and stairs with regard to evacuation times. These calculations use current computer simulation programs, based on microscopic models, and the macroscopic method of Predtechenskii and Milinskii [1]. For the computer simulation we used ASERI 3.4c, buildingEXODUS V4.0 Level 2, PedGo Version 2.1.1 and Simulex 11.1.3. The comparison of the results shows that even for the simplest systems evacuation times vary considerably for different simulation programs and deviate from experimental results. Furthermore we investigated effects of geometric boundary conditions on the evacuation time.