It is of great significance to understand the dynamics and risk level of pedestrians at the multi-exit inspection points, since they are the bottlenecks of pedestrian flow leaving public places, such as subway and railway stations. Microscopic simulations were carried out with a cellular automata model to investigate the effects of ticket-checking failure on pedestrian dynamics when passing through the multi-exit inspection points with parallel, convex and concave layouts. It was found that although ticket-checking failure could reduce the passing efficiency, it also lowers the competitive level between pedestrians and enhances passing safety in the range of medium and high pedestrian density. The competitive level decreases when increasing the probability of ticket-checking failure and the corresponding delay. The probability of ticket-checking failure and the corresponding delay have equivalent effects on passing efficiency and safety, and can be integrated as average delay. A fitted equation was proposed for the dependence of passing efficiency and safety on average delay. With the existence of ticket-checking failure in reality, the concave layout of the multi-exit inspection points gives rise to a much lower competitive level compared with the parallel and convex ones, which would enhance the safety of pedestrians at the exits.
Potential field cellular automata model for pedestrian flow