Experimental Study of Crowd Flow Passing through Simple-shaped Room and Validation for an Evacuation Simulator

This paper describes the characteristics of crowd flow passing through simple-shaped rooms and to validate an evacuation simulation model called “SimTread”. It presents experiments on crowd flow with 43 subjects and intends to quantify the aspects of crowd flow in simple rooms. Recently, for estimating evacuation of buildings on fire, several computer simulation models have been developed and applied. However, human evacuation data-sets for validating simulation are scarce. The results of this study show that pedestrian flow rate at the opening changes depending on the density of the space connected. Flow rate rises if the opening is connected to larger space, which is less dense and, in result, increases speed of pedestrians. For validating an evacuation simulator, evacuation data from actual building fires are too complex for proving the equivalence. Therefore, we carried out the experiments of crowed flow passing through simpleshaped rooms, and compared experimental data with our simulation results. There was a good agreement between the result of experiments and simulations. The differences were less than 10%.