Study on Pedestrian Flow Prediction of Specific Flow Using Dimensionless Width

In amendment of Building Standards Act of the year 2000, the verification method for evacuation safety was introduced. Knowledge gained in Togawa’s study (1955) is frequently used in this verification method; however, depending on the spatial condition, the estimated results differ from the actual crowd walk nature and this remains a challenge. Considering the situation, this study aims to illustrate the relationship between the spatial condition and crowd walk nature and analyze data gained from the Crowd Evacuation Experiment done in 2015 at Tokyo University of Science. When a corridor includes an opening (a bottleneck) or a merging, a pedestrian crowd will be restrained at the opening/merging. Each part of the bottleneck corridor showed a very similar feature as the merging corridor. Therefore, this study analyzed the bottleneck corridor and merging corridor with a uniform model. These analysis results confirmed the relationship between each part’s density and the ratio of inflow width to the outflow width and showed that specific flow can be calculated from the margin of two densities, regardless of the spatial condition.