Abstract: With the aggravation of aging population, the importance of wheelchair users' evacuation in building safety evacuation design is becoming increasingly prominent. The evacuation characteristics of wheelchair-bound people under self-drive and push-drive evacuation patterns and the conflict avoidance behaviors when encounter with other wheelchair-bound people in the same or the opposite directions were investigated through designed experiments. Results showed that the evacuation speed of wheelchair-bound people under push-drive pattern were 1.9～2.6 times larger than that under self-drive pattern, since it is easier to push the wheelchair and control the direction under the push-drive pattern. The evacuation speed of wheelchair-bound people increased with the increasement of the width of aisle under both self-drive and push-drive evacuation patterns. This is mainly due to that the wheelchair-bound people are easy to collide with the passage boundary and reduce the evacuation speed under narrow passage conditions. When encounter with the opposite people, the wheelchair-bound people always shifted to the right to avoid walking conflict, and they always adjusted their speed to form the front and rear longitudinal evacuation mode when they evacuating side-by-side with other wheelchair users. Therefore, in the design of safe evacuation for wheelchair-bounded people, a reasonable evacuation width should be set to avoid limiting their evacuation speed, and the assisted evacuation mode should be adopted as much as possible under favorable conditions.

Key words: wheelchair-bound people, safety evacuation, evacuation patterns, aisle width, conflict avoidance behaviors