Walking on stairs: Experiment and model

Abstract

An increasing global population forces urban planners to construct buildings and infrastructure that is extremely deep and high. Elevators and escalators serve skyscrapers and tunnels, but in an emergency people still have to walk on stairs. Computer simulations can mitigate risks of escape situations. For these situations, pedestrian locomotion models need to match reality well. Motion on stairs, however, is not nearly as well understood as motion in the plane. Publications are scarce and some are contradictory. As a result, movement on stairs is usually modeled by slowing down pedestrians by a fixed factor. But is this justified? And what happens at intermediate landings? This contribution aims to clarify inconclusive results of previous research and provide new information to directly incorporate empirical results into a parsimonious computer model. The algorithms are freely available through an open-source framework. After outlining the shortcomings of existing approaches, we present three experiments, from which we derive requirements for the computer model. Reenacting computer experiments shows the extent to which our model meets our observations. We conclude with an applied example, simulating an evacuation of Germany's famous Neuschwanstein Castle.