Evacuation characteristics of preschool children through bottlenecks

Authors

  • Jun Zhang State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
  • Hongliu Li State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
  • Yanghui Hu State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
  • Weiguo Song State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17815/CD.2020.58

Keywords:

bottleneck, pedestrian flow, competition, preschool children evacuation

Abstract

Pedestrian movement through bottlenecks have been widely studied from various aspects to understand the effects of bottlenecks on the pedestrian flow. However, few attentions have been paid to the movement characteristics of preschool children, who show obvious differences behaviour compared to adults due to the poor balance and understanding of danger especial under emergencies. In this study, we focus on the evacuation characteristics of preschool children through bottlenecks with laboratory experiments. From all the experiment, we do not observe clear lane formation process from the trajectories diagrams. It is found that the first arrive first out principle does not work in the situation with competition. Compared to adults, children are more likely to fall and hard to be controlled during movement, which is very dangerous in emergencies. The highest speed for the preschool children can beyond 3 m/s and is depend on the location in the crowd for each individual. For a given number of evacuees, the total evacuation time firstly decreases a linear with the increasing the bottleneck width and then keeps a constant if nobody falls down during the movement. Falling down of children will increase the evacuation time incredibly. The findings will be beneficial for the evacuation drill design in kindergarten as well as the facility design for young children.

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Published

27.03.2020

How to Cite

Zhang, J., Li, H., Hu, Y., & Song, W. (2020). Evacuation characteristics of preschool children through bottlenecks. Collective Dynamics, 5, 253–261. https://doi.org/10.17815/CD.2020.58

Issue

Section

Proceedings of Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2018