In order to analyse the behaviour of pedestrians at the very fine scale, while moving along the streets, in open spaces or inside a building, simulation modelling becomes an essential tool. In these spatial environments, in the presence of unusual demand flows, simulation requires the ability to model the local dynamics of individual decision making and behaviour, which is strongly affected by the geometry, randomness, social preferences, local and collective behaviour of other individuals. The dynamics of people visiting and evacuating a museum offers an excellent case study along this line. In this paper we realize an agent-based simulation of the Castello Ursino museum in Catania (Italy), evaluating its carrying capacity in terms of both satisfaction of the visitors in regime of normal fruition and their safety under alarm conditions.
Walking is a fundamental activity of human life, not only for moving between places but also for interacting with surrounding environments. While walking to destinations, pedestrians may acquaint themselves with attractions such as artworks, shop displays, and public events. If such attractions are tempting enough, pedestrians opt to stop walking in order to join the attractions. In crowded conditions, the existence of attractions may considerably affect the pedestrian flow patterns. One can see that the attracted pedestrians often impede passerby flow near the attractions during peak hour in …
How to reproduce realistic motion in simulations has always been a fundamental problem for pedestrian dynamics, and a critical challenge for current studies is the natural correlation of the movement choices and the human behaviours. To advance the study, we deconstruct the two-dimensional space of pedestrian crowds with a behavioural motion network on basis of Voronoi diagram and Delaunay diagram, and accordingly formulate a behavioural model considering both the long-term route choice and the real-time velocity choice. The comparisons between simulation results and real-world movements sugge…
The conjugated forces model (CFM) capable of reproducing bypassing behaviour is proposed and adopted to simulate pedestrian evacuation. Primarily, the concept of collision and evading and surpassing behaviour is particularly defined to describe the proposed CFM. A pedestrian whose behaviour can be described by the CFM will change his desired direction when confronted with a collision, and choose to actively bypass others. Secondly, pedestrian movement in a passageway is simulated to testify the capacity of the CFM to reproduce microscopic bypassing behaviour, and the bypassing parameter is the…
Being determined by human social behaviour, pedestrian group dynamics depends on "intrinsic properties" of the group such as the purpose of the pedestrians, their personal relation, their gender, age, and body size. In this work we quantitatively study the dynamical properties of pedestrian dyads by analysing a large data set of automatically tracked pedestrian trajectories in an unconstrained "ecological" setting (a shopping mall), whose relational group properties have been coded by three different human observers. We observed that females walk slower and closer than males, that workers walk…
Road accidents involving pedestrians are still too numerous in cities, particularly at crosswalks. Many pedestrians crossed at the red light at zebras increasing the risk of accidents, for them and for people following mimetically them. Several studies tried to understand the causes of these illegal road-crossing behaviours, showing an effect of age, gender but also culture. This current study aims to understand causes of the uncertainty behaviour in two different countries: France and Japan. Uncertainty behaviour during road-crossing is here defined as a walking stop or a slowing down during …
Followership is generally defined as a strategy that evolved to solve social coordination problems, and particularly those involved in group movement. Followership behaviour is particularly interesting in the context of road-crossing behaviour because it involves other principles such as risk-taking and evaluating the value of social information. This study sought to identify the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision-making by pedestrians who follow another person across the road at the green or at the red light in two different countries (France and Japan). We used agent-based modelling to…
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…
Experimental Analysis of Two-Dimensional Pedestrian Flow in front of the Bottleneck
这一贡献提出了实验研究的二维行人流的目的是捕捉行人行为的集群内形成的瓶颈。根据Ezaki et al.（2012）的相变研究，安排了两个通过一进一出房间的实验，调节流入速率以获得不同的行走模式。通过自动图像处理，从摄像机记录中提取行人路径，得到实际速度和局部密度。通过虚拟检测器和行人离开时间提取宏观信息。行人的行为是通过密度和速度进行评价。不同的测量方法进行了比较，使用几个基本图表。研究了群体行为的两个阶段，并描述了群体行为的相变。
Following the paradigm set by attraction-repulsion-alignment schemes, a myriad of individual based models have been proposed to calculate the evolution of abstract agents. While the emergent features of many agent systems have been described astonishingly well with force-based models, this is not the case for pedestrians. Many of the classical schemes have failed to capture the fine detail of crowd dynamics, and it is unlikely that a purely mechanical model will succeed. As a response to the mechanistic literature, we will consider a model for pedestrian dynamics that attempts to reproduce the…
Human beings have to make numerous decisions every day, and these decisions might be biased and influenced by different personal, social and/or environmental variables. Pedestrians are ideal subjects for the study of decision-making, due to the inter-individual variation in risk taking. Many studies have attempted to understand which environmental factors (light colour, waiting times, etc.) influence the number of times pedestrians broke the rules at road-crossings, very few focused on the decision-making process of pedestrians according to the different conditions of these variables, that is …
Port-Hamiltonian systems (PHS) theory is a recent but already well-established modelling approach for non-linear physical systems. Some studies have shown lately that PHS frameworks are relevant for modelling and control of swarm and multi-agent systems. We identify in this contribution a general class of microscopic force-based pedestrian models that can be formulated as a port-Hamiltonian system. The pedestrian PHS has linear structure and dissipation components. Non-linear effects come from isotropic pedestrian interactions. Simulation results on a torus with disordered initial states show …
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…
Stop-and-go waves are commonly observed in traffic and pedestrian flows. In traffic theory they are described by phase transitions of metastable models. The self-organization phenomenon occurs due to inertia mechanisms but requires fine tuning of the parameters. Here, a novel explanation for stop-and-go waves based on stochastic effects is presented for pedestrian dynamics. We show that the introduction of specific coloured noises in a stable microscopic model allows to describe realistic pedestrian stop-and-go behaviour without requirement of metastability and phase transition. We compare sim…
With the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic spreading across the world, protective measures for containing the virus are essential, especially as long as no vaccine or effective treatment is available. One important measure is the so-called physical distancing or social distancing. In this paper, we propose an agent-based numerical simulation of pedestrian dynamics in order to assess behaviour of pedestrians in public places in the context of contact-transmission of infectious diseases like COVID-19, and to gather insights about exposure times and the overall effectiveness of distan…
We investigate the effect of groups on a bi-directional flow, by using novel computational methods. Our focus is on self-organisation phenomena, and more specifically on the time needed for the occurrence of pedestrian lanes, their stability and their effect on the velocity-density relation. Moreover, we are interested in understanding the amount of physical contact in the crowd. To this end, we use a novel model considering the asymmetrical shape of the human body and describing its rotation during collision avoidance, and combine it to a mathematical model of group behaviour. We configure se…
Viral transmission in pedestrian crowds: Coupling an open-source code assessing the risks of airborne contagion with diverse pedestrian dynamics models
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…
Dense granular flows through constrictions, as well as competitive pedestrian evacuations, are hindered by a propensity to form clogs. We usesimulations of model pedestrians and experiments with granular disks to explore an original strategy to speed up these flows, which consists in including contact-averse entities in the assembly. On the basis of a minimal cellular automaton and a continuous agent-based model for pedestrian evacuation dynamics, we find that the inclusion of polite pedestrians amid a given competitive crowd fails to reduce the evacuation time when the constriction (the doorw…
Microscopic approaches to the simulation of pedestrian dynamics rely on modelling the behaviour of individual agents and their mutual interactions. Regarding the spatial resolution, microscopic simulators are either based on continuous (SpaceCont) or discrete (SpaceDisc) approaches. To combine the advantages of both approaches, we propose to integrate SpaceCont and SpaceDisc into a hybrid simulation model. Such a hybrid approach allows simulating critical regions with a continuous spatial resolution and uncritical ones with discrete spatial resolution while enabling consistent information exch…
In this work we investigate the behaviour of a human crowd in a cross-flow. We first analyse the results of a set of controlled experiments in which subjects were divided into two groups, in such a way to explore different density settings, and asked to walk through the crossing area. We study the results of the experiment by analysing, along with traditional indicators such as density and velocity, also walking and body orientation, studying how these microscopic observables are influenced by density. Furthermore, we report a preliminary but quantitative analysis on the emergence of self-orga…
When legs and bodies synchronize: Two-level collective dynamics in dense crowds
Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS)（于利希研究中心，先进模拟研究所）；Inria Rennes and Universities of Rennes 1 and Rennes 2（法国国家信息与自动化研究所雷恩中心，雷恩第一大学和雷恩第二大学）；University of Wuppertal, Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering（伍珀塔尔大学，建筑与土木工程学院）；University of Wuppertal, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Safety Engineering（伍珀塔尔大学，机械与安全工程学院）
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德天主教大学）；Virtual Human Simulation Laboratory VHLab（虚拟人类仿真实验室）；Graduate Course on Computer Science（计算机科学研究生课程）；Graduate Course on Psychology（心理学研究生课程）
This paper presents a study regarding group behavior in a controlled experiment focused on differences in an important attribute that vary across cultures -- the personal spaces -- in two Countries: Brazil and Germany. In order to coherently compare Germany and Brazil evolutions with same population applying same task, we performed the pedestrian Fundamental Diagram experiment in Brazil, as performed in Germany. We use CNNs to detect and track people in video sequences. With this data, we use Voronoi Diagrams to find out the neighbor relation among people and then compute the walking distances…
