Experimental Study on Evacuation Behaviour of Passengers in a Confined Seat Area

Abstract

High-speed trains play an increasingly crucial role in mass transportation systems in China. Due to the confined space and high-density crowds in the train seat area, evacuation from trains is a critically risky event during emergencies but has not yet been fully understood. To fill this gap, well-controlled passenger evacuation experiments in the confined seat area were conducted, based on which microscopic trajectories, evacuation times, flow rates, and typical evacuation behaviours were collected and systematically analyzed. The results suggest that the narrow aisle is a significant bottleneck that impedes passenger evacuation. The evacuation time of passengers increases with the number of seat rows. Furthermore, the instantaneous flow rate can be well captured by the Loglogistic distribution. Some typical phenomena, including overtaking and pushing behaviours, are observed and analyzed. The empirical findings of this study are conducive to deepening the understanding of train passengers’ evacuation behaviour in the seat area.