Human crowd motion is mainly driven by self-organized processes based on local interactions among pedestrians. While most studies of crowd behavior consider only interactions among isolated individuals, it turns out that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually moving in groups, such as friends, couples, or families walking together. These groups constitute medium-scale aggregated structures and their impact on crowd dynamics is still largely unknown. In this work, we analyze the motion of approximately 1500 pedestrian groups under natural condition, and show that social interactions among group members generate typical group walking patterns that influence crowd dynamics. At low density, group members tend to walk side by side, forming a line perpendicular to the walking direction. As the density increases, however, the linear walking formation is bent forward, turning it into a V-like pattern. These spatial patterns can be well described by a model based on social communication between group members. We show that the V-like walking pattern facilitates social interactions within the group, but reduces the flow because of its "non-aerodynamic" shape. Therefore, when crowd density increases, the group organization results from a trade-off between walking faster and facilitating social exchange. These insights demonstrate that crowd dynamics is not only determined by physical constraints induced by other pedestrians and the environment, but also significantly by communicative, social interactions among individuals.
In this paper, controlled experiments have been conducted to make deep analysis on the obstacle evading behavior of individual pedestrians affected by one obstacle. Results of Fourier Transform show that with the increase of obstacle width, the frequency and amplitude of body sway would barely be affected while the lateral deviation of walking direction would largely increase. On the one hand, the relation among the extracted gait features including body sway, stride length, frequency and speed has been illustrated. On the other hand, the walking direction can be featured by three critical eva…
We observe body-rotation behavior of pedestrians to avoid others when they are moving in congested situations. In such cases, body orientation often differs from walking direction, i.e., pedestrians step sideways. In this paper, we focused on a deviation between body orientation and walking direction during collision avoidance by body rotation for counter-flows in narrow corridors quantitatively. We conducted simple experiments in which two pedestrians passed each other. We found that pedestrians rotated their bodies when the width of the corridor was smaller than the sum of the widths of the …
Understanding pedestrian dynamics and the interaction of pedestrians with their environment is crucial to the safe and comfortable design of pedestrian facilities. Experiments offer the opportunity to explore the influence of individual factors. In the context of the project CroMa (Crowd Management in transport infrastructures), experiments were conducted with about 1000 participants to test various physical and social psychological hypotheses focusing on people's behaviour at railway stations and crowd management measures. The following experiments were performed: i) Train Platform Experiment…
An agent-based model (ABM) for simulating flood-pedestrian interaction is augmented to particularly explore more realistic responses of evacuating pedestrians during flooding. Pedestrian agents within the ABM follow navigation rules of governing their movement in dry areas. When in floodwater, pedestrian agents are assigned extra behavioural rules to factor in their states of stability and walking speed, and their different body height and weight. The ABM is applied to replicate a synthetic test case of a flooded shopping centre, considering increasingly sophisticated configuration modes for t…
Pedestrian egress from training schools in the after-class period (especially in China, as children walk down stairs together with their parents) raises practical concerns related to degraded flow conditions and possible safety hazards, but also represents a challenge to mainstream modeling approaches for several reasons: they involve heterogeneous groups (adult-child pairs), which are hardly studied compared to their homogeneous counterparts, in a complex geometry, made of staircases connected by a platform where pedestrians rotate, and over a wide range of densities. In light of our field ob…
The Social Force Model (SFM) is a suitable model for describing crowd behaviors under emotional stress. This research analyzes the role of the body force in the original SFM. We focused on the parameter associated with the body stiffness (kn) and its impact on the pedestrian dynamics for two different geometries: bottlenecks and corridors. Increasing kn produces opposite effects on the crowd dynamics for each geometry: an increase of the crowd velocity for bottlenecks, and a decrease for corridors. The former reflects the fact that an increase in the stiffness reduces the overlap between pedes…
Viral transmission in pedestrian crowds: Coupling an open-source code assessing the risks of airborne contagion with diverse pedestrian dynamics models
Quantitatively modeling the trajectories and behavior of pedestrians walking in crowds is an outstanding fundamental challenge deeply connected with the physics of flowing active matter, from a scientific point of view, and having societal applications entailing individual safety and comfort, from an application perspective. In this contribution, we review a pedestrian dynamics modeling approach, previously proposed by the authors, aimed at reproducing some of the statistical features of pedestrian motion. Comparing with high-statistics pedestrian dynamics measurements collected in real-life c…
The local navigation of pedestrians amid a crowd is generally believed to involve no anticipation beyond (at best) the avoidance of the most imminent collisions. We show that current models rooted in this belief fail to reproduce some key features experimentally evidenced when a dense static crowd is crossed by an intruder. We identify the missing ingredient as the pedestrians' ability to plan their motion well beyond the next interaction, whence they may accept to move towards denser regions for a short time. To account for this effect, we introduce a minimal model based on mean-field game th…
Physical distancing, as a measure to contain the spreading of Covid-19, is defining a "new normal". Unless belonging to a family, pedestrians in shared spaces are asked to observe a minimal (country-dependent) pairwise distance. Coherently, managers of public spaces may be tasked with the enforcement or monitoring of this constraint. As privacy-respectful real-time tracking of pedestrian dynamics in public spaces is a growing reality, it is natural to leverage on these tools to analyze the adherence to physical distancing and compare the effectiveness of crowd management measurements. Typical …
Pedestrian crowding occurs more frequent. As a result of the increasing pedestrian demand in public space, the limits of pedestrian spaces are of increasing interest. Some research on the maximum demand that can flow through a cross-section has been presented, which mainly features simple movement base cases, low-density situations and/or a homogeneous crowd. Consequently, it is currently unclear to what extent their findings apply to heterogeneous high-density crowds, which are often encountered during real-world scenarios. The CrowdLimits experiment attempted to reproduce crowd movement dyna…
Pedestrians are often encountered walking in the company of some social relations, rather than alone. The social groups thus formed, in variable proportions depending on the context, are not randomly organised but exhibit distinct features, such as the well-known tendency of 3-member groups to be arranged in a V-shape. The existence of group structures is thus likely to impact the collective dynamics of the crowd, possibly in a critical way when emergency situations are considered. After turning a blind eye to these group aspects for years, endeavours to model groups in crowd simulation softwa…
Minimizing social contact is an important tool to reduce the spread of diseases, but harms people's well-being. This and other, more compelling reasons, urge people to walk outside periodically. The present simulation explores how organizing the traffic of pedestrians affects the number of walking or running people passing by each other. By applying certain rules this number can be significantly reduced, thus reducing the contribution of person-to-person contagious to the basic reproductive number, R0. One example is the traffic of pedestrians on sidewalks. Another is the use of walking or run…
College of Science, University of Sulaimani（苏莱曼尼大学理学院）；Sulaimania Polytechnic University（苏莱曼尼亚理工大学）；University of Kurdistan Hewler（休勒库尔德斯坦大学）
This paper attempts to design an intelligent simulation model for pedestrian crowd evacuation. For this purpose, the cellular automata(CA) was fully integrated with fuzzy logic, the kth nearest neighbors (KNN), and some statistical equations. In this model, each pedestrian was assigned a specific speed, according to his/her physical, biological and emotional features. The emergency behavior and evacuation efficiency of each pedestrian were evaluated by coupling his or her speed with various elements, such as environment, pedestrian distribution and familiarity with the exits. These elements al…
Physics-based modeling and data representation of pedestrian pairwise interactions
理解和定量建模人群中行走的行人之间的相互作用的物理学的可能性具有引人注目的相关应用，例如，与民用基础设施的设计和安全有关。在这项工作中，我们研究了稀释人群中的观察实验数据的行人-行人相互作用。在运动中，行人调整他们的步行路径，试图保持相互舒适的距离，避免碰撞。在数学模型中，这种行为通常通过“社会”相互作用力来建模。利用高质量，高统计数据集-由数百万从最先进的观测实验中获得的真实轨迹组成-我们开发了一个定量模型，能够解决二元碰撞避免情况下的相互作用。我们根据长距离和短距离力对相互作用进行建模，我们将其应用于非相互作用行人运动的Langevin模型[Corbetta et al. Phys.Rev.E 95，032316，2017]。我们提出的新模型的特点是朗之万动力学与“快”的随机速度波动叠加到“慢”的动态隐藏的模型变量：“预期”的步行路径。该模型能够再现相关的统计数据的碰撞避免运动，如统计的侧位移和通过速度。罕见的碰撞事件也被恢复。此外，与现实生活中的轨道的大数据集进行比较涉及到一个迄今为止被忽视的额外挑战：在包含非常异构的条件的数据库中，仅识别与二进制回避相互作用相对应的相关事件。为了应对这一挑战，我们提出了一种新的方法，基于行人轨迹的图形表示，这使我们能够操作的复杂性降低有效的数据选择。
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；ProRail Stations（ProRail车站）；SBB AG（瑞士联邦铁路股份公司）；CNR-IAC（意大利国家研究委员会应用计算研究所）
High-fidelity pedestrian tracking in real-life conditions has been an important tool in fundamental crowd dynamics research allowing to quantify statistics of relevant observables including walking velocities, mutual distances and body orientations. As this technology advances, it is becoming increasingly useful also in society. In fact, continued urbanization is overwhelming existing pedestrian infrastructures such as transportation hubs and stations, generating an urgent need for real-time highly-accurate usage data, aiming both at flow monitoring and dynamics understanding. To successfully …
