Calibration of Pedestrian Simulation Model for Emergency Doors by Pedestrian Type

Emergency doors may be bottlenecks in the evacuation of a building. When a pedestrian simulation model is used to assess designs of buildings, the model should accurately predict the behavior of pedestrians around emergency doors and thus the doors’ capacity. Data from laboratory experiments were used to calibrate the pedestrian simulation model Nomad. In these experiments, large heterogeneous groups of people passed through a door under evacuation conditions. The collected trajectory data were used as input for an automated calibration procedure, which yielded parameter estimates for individual pedestrians. This automated calibration procedure has been extended through inclusion of data from multiple pedestrians into a single estimate. This change overcomes convergence problems because the log likelihood is insensitive to changes in some of the parameters and because of the problems of unrealistic parameter estimates. The resulting parameter distributions provided insight into pedestrian behavior. Dedicated parameter sets for the elderly, adults, and children were estimated. The parameter sets and thus behaviors of the types of pedestrians were compared and showed that different behavior was indeed observed.