Abstract:

In order to study the influence of visually impaired pedestrians on crowd evacuation, a floor field cellular automata evacuation model was established to simulate the movement state and evolution process of crowd evacuation in the place where visually impaired pedestrians appeared. In the model, the evacuation behavior of visually impaired pedestrians was described by combining with the controlled experiment phenomenon of ISOBE et al., and the helping behavior of normal pedestrians to visually impaired pedestrians was considered. Besides, the movement of the small group was determined by the movement probability and modified Moore neighborhood. Then the influence of normal pedestrians' helping behavior, the proportion of visually impaired pedestrians and the exit location on the evacuation were studied using the model. The results showed that the helping behavior of normal pedestrians to visually impaired pedestrians could effectively reduce the evacuation time, and the beneficial effect of helping behaviors on the evacuation efficiency became more significant as the crowd density increased. The evacuation efficiency would reduce when the proportion of visually impaired pedestrians in mixed crowds increased, and this adverse influence would increase as the crowd density increased. Compared with the exit at the corner and the exit near the side wall, the location of the exit in the middle of the wall is more beneficial to the evacuation of mixed crowds.

Key words: visually impaired pedestrian, normal pedestrian, evacuation model, helping behavior, cellular automata, evacuation time