Modeling and simulating the pedestrian flow in a training school classroom during the pickup period

Children training schools widely exist in China and pedestrian congestion and potential safety hazard occurs during the pickup period. However, little effort has been made to explore the pedestrian flow in a training school. In this paper, we study the pedestrian flow in a training school classroom during the pickup period. Based on the features of the pedestrian flow in training school classrooms, we design three rules to depict the adult-child matching behavior, and then propose an extended CA (cellular automaton) model to explore each pedestrian's motion under each rule. The numerical results show that each rule influences the matching behavior, each pedestrian's motion, the evacuation efficiency and the potential safety hazard. These results can help administrators to design some effective evacuation strategies in training school during the pickup period (especially when an emergency occurs).