Obstruction and its influence on crowd evacuation flow at egresses of public venues

This paper presents the analysis of the obstructs and their influences on egress evacuation performance in crowded public venues. Digital tests of crowd flow are presented, in which 400 pedestrians were stochastically distributed in a space measuring 24000 × 21000 (mm). Crowd behavior phenomena, saying arching and jamming, could be observed after certain critical points. From a comparison of the digital tests, it could be seen that, with the changes of obstructs' size and numbers in densely populated buildings, the pedestrian flow performance shows different character, especially when bigger obstruct located before two closely located egresses.