Come together: A unified description of the escalator capacity

We investigate a variety of aspects related to the simulation of passenger dynamics on escalators, mainly focusing on the discrepancy between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘practical’ capacity that is observed for these facilities. The structure of the paper is twofold. In the first part, we introduce a space-continuous model to describe the transition of agents from walking on the plain to standing on the escalator. In the second part, we use numerical findings from simulations to study important measures like minimum distances between the standing agents and average occupancies of the escalator steps. One of the most important results obtained in this paper is a generalized analytical formula that describes the escalator capacity. We show that, apart from the conveyor speed, the capacity essentially depends on the time gap between entering passengers which we interpret as human reaction time. Comparing simulation results with corresponding empirical data from field studies and experiments, we deduce a minimum human reaction time in the range of 0.15s–0.30s which is in perfect agreement with results from social psychology. With these findings, it is now possible to determine accurately the relationship between the capacity and the speed of an escalator, allowing a science-based performance evaluation of buildings with escalators.