Emergency Evacuation Capacity of an Escalator

In an emergency situation, pedestrians flow into the evacuation paths of buildings like stairs, escalators, corridors and moving walkways. The capacity of evacuation paths must be high enough for the pedestrians to evacuate safely. Due to the high population density in big cities, most of the service facilities and buildings are dominated by escalators. This book aims to measure emergency evacuation capacity (EEC) of escalators. For this purpose; a new emergency pedestrian behavior model with direction change sub-model and acceleration/deceleration sub-model specific to escalators is proposed considering pedestrians¿ characteristics by gender and age. In order to formulate EEC of escalators, a discrete event simulation is used with the extension of cellular automata and queuing theory approaches. Possible evacuation scenarios are tested and results are discussed. Results give us insights about usefulness of proposed approach for more realistic EEC estimation of escalators.