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 dynamics of heterogeneous crowds experiencing higher densities than have been recorded up to this moment. Here, the aim was to study the impact of the three important differences between the current laboratory studies and real-world crowd dynamics in crowded pedestrian spaces simultaneously, namely crowd heterogeneity, high densities movements, and (more) complex movement base cases. This study shows that there are substantial differences in the maximum sustainable flow rate, and the maximum local and global sustainable density for distinct movement base cases and flow ratios. Moreover, the results provide evidence of that continuation of flow under very high densities can be recreated under laboratory conditions using a heterogeneous population of pedestrians. Besides, the experimental results indicate that the maximum global flow rate decreases when the scenario becomes more difficult (i.e. bidirectional to intersecting) and the collision avoidance opportunities decrease (i.e. 80-20 to 50-50 flow ratio). Thus, this paper concludes that the maximum flow rate of pedestrian infrastructures decreases with increasing complexity.
This paper will present a model for pedestrian motion by defining a spacetime metric. This model considers the factors that are effective in the movement of pedestrians (such as obstacles, walls and other pedestrians) by defining a proper metric. In fact, the surrounding environment that affects the motion of pedestrians changes the flat(Euclidean) spacetime metric and, therefore, the shortest possible path to their destination. This change is such that pedestrians have a different feeling of time at any point and moment in the environment. Based on this feeling, they adjust their route to the…
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…
Center for Complex Engineering Systems（复杂工程系统中心）；King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology（国王阿卜杜勒阿齐兹科技城）
People tend to walk in groups, and interactions with those groups have a significant impact on crowd behavior and pedestrian traffic dynamics. Social norms can be seen as unwritten rules regulating people interactions in social settings. This article studies people interactions with groups and the emergence of group proxemics. Group zones, zone occupancy counts and people clearance from the group are studied using naturalistic data. Analysis indicate potential presence of three different zones in addition to the public zone. People tend to remain in the public zone and only progressively get c…
Reducing the number of contacts between passengers on an airplane can potentially curb the spread of infectious diseases. In this paper, a social force based pedestrian movement model is formulated and applied to evaluate the movement and contacts among passengers during boarding and deplaning of an airplane. Within the social force modeling framework, we introduce location dependence on the self-propelling momentum of pedestrian particles. The model parameters are varied over a large design space and the results are compared with experimental observations to validate the model. This model is …
An aging population is bringing new challenges to the management of escape routes and facility design in many countries. This paper investigates pedestrian movement properties of crowd with different age compositions. Three pedestrian groups are considered: young student group, old people group and mixed group. It is found that traffic jams occur more frequently in mixed group due to the great differences of mobilities and self-adaptive abilities among pedestrians. The jams propagate backward with a velocity 0.4 m/s for global density around 1.75 m-1 and 0.3 m/s for higher than 2.3 m-1. The fu…
There are different physics-based approaches for analysing pedestrian movement. Physics-based methods like statistical mechanics-based models apply the laws of physics to drive equations for analysing crowd behaviour. This paper will introduce a physics-based approach based on field theory as a new tool for crowd analysis to determine governing differential equations. Formulating the pedestrian movement with differential equations has a primary advantage for data assimilation techniques because some of these methods only work with models with analytical transition functions, which are obtained…
Clogging raises as the principal phenomenon during many evacuation processes of pedestrians in a panic situation. As people push to escape from danger, compression forces may increase to harming levels. Many individuals might fall down, while others will try to dodge the fallen people, or, simply pass through them. We studied the dynamics of the crowd for these situations, in the context of the "social force model". We modeled the unconscious (fallen) pedestrians as inanimate bodies that can be dodged (or not) by the surrounding individuals. We found that new morphological structures appear al…
Mathematical modeling of epidemic spreading has been widely adopted to estimate the threats of epidemic diseases (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic) as well as to evaluate epidemic control interventions. The indoor place is considered to be a significant epidemic spreading risk origin, but existing widely-used epidemic spreading models are usually limited for indoor places since the dynamic physical distance changes between people are ignored, and the empirical features of the essential and non-essential travel are not differentiated. In this paper, we introduce a pedestrian-based epidemic spreading…
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 worldwide population is aging and countries are facing ongoing challenges in improving the safety of elderly pedestrians. In this work, single-file movement of the elderly are experimentally compared with that of different age groups. The findings indicates that the age is not the only factor influencing the pedestrian dynamics but the heterogeneity of the crowd composition and the familiarity among neighboring pedestrians also have significant effects. The existence of three regimes in the relationship between headway and speed is confirmed. In the strong constrained regime, the slope of …
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…
Pedestrian modeling is a good way to predict pedestrian movement and thus can be used for controlling pedestrian crowds and guiding evacuations in emergencies. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian movement model based on artificial neural network. In the model, the pedestrian velocity vectors are predicted with two sub models, Semicircular Forward Space Based submodel (SFSB-submodel) and Rectangular Forward Space Based submodel (RFSB-submodel), respectively. Both unidirectional and bidirectional pedestrian flow at straight corridors are investigated by comparing the simulation and the corres…
We present an integrated microsimulation framework to estimate the pedestrian movement over time and space with limited data on directional counts. Using the activity-based approach, simulation can compute the overall demand and trajectory of each agent, which are in accordance with the available partial observations and are in response to the initial and evolving supply conditions and schedules. This simulation contains a chain of processes including: activities generation, decision point choices, and assignment. They are considered in an iteratively updating loop so that the simulation can d…
The worldwide population is aging and countries are facing ongoing challenges in meeting the transportation demand of the elderly. In this study, we investigate the movement characteristics of elders in the straight corridor and compare them with that of young adults. The free speeds of the elderly (about 1.28m/s) are obviously slower than that of the young people (about 1.4m/s) in the laboratory experiments. It was found that the fundamental diagram of the elderly shows the similar trend compared with that of young pedestrians. However, at the same densities the speeds of the elderly are alwa…
This article is on collective phenomena in pedestrian dynamics during the assembling and dispersal phases of gatherings. To date pedestrian dynamics have been primarily studied in the natural and engineering sciences. Pedestrians are analyzed and modeled as driven particles revealing self-organizing phenomena and complex transport characteristics. However, pedestrians in crowds also behave as living beings according to stimulus-response mechanisms or act as human subjects on the basis of social norms, social identities or strategies. To show where pedestrian dynamics need social psychology in …
We combine a pedestrian dynamics model with a contact tracing method to simulate the initial spreading of a highly infectious airborne disease in a confined environment. We focus on a medium size population (up to 1000 people) with a small number of infectious people (1 or 2) and the rest of the people is divided between immune and susceptible. We adopt a space-continuous model that represents pedestrian dynamics by the forces acting on them, i.e. a microscopic force-based model. Once discretized, the model results in a high-dimensional system of second order ordinary differential equations. B…
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…
We conducted numerical simulation for a crowd of pedestrians. Each pedestrian, modeled with three circles, has a shape whose long axis is perpendicular to the anteroposterior axis, and is designed to move fixed destination. The pedestrians have friction at the surface and soft repulsion. In this study, we newly introduced an active rotation which captures psychological effect to evade face-to-face situation. The numerical simulation revealed that active rotation induces fluidization of system leading to higher flux of pedestrian. We further confirmed that this fluidization is due to fragmentat…
Designing efficient traffic lanes for pedestrians is a critical aspect of urban planning as walking remains the most common form of mobility among the increasingly diverse methods of transportation. Herein, we investigate pedestrian counter flows in a straight corridor, in which two groups of people are walking in opposite directions. We demonstrate, using a molecular dynamics approach applying the social force model, that a simple array of obstacles improves flow rates by producing flow separations even in crowded situations. We also report on a developed model describing the separation behav…
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 …
People flow data are utilized in diverse fields such as urban and commercial planning and disaster management. However, people flow data collected from mobile phones, such as using global positioning system and call detail records data, are difficult to obtain because of privacy issues. Even if the data were obtained, they would be difficult to handle. This study developed pseudo-people-flow data covering all of Japan by combining public statistical and travel survey data from limited urban areas. This dataset is not a representation of actual travel movements but of typical weekday movements …
Pedestrian dynamics models the walking movement of individuals in a crowd. It has recently been used in the analysis of procedures to reduce the risk of disease spread in airplanes, relying on the SPED model. This is a social force model inspired by molecular dynamics; pedestrians are treated as point particles, and their trajectories are determined in a simulation. A parameter sweep is performed to address uncertainties in human behavior, which requires a large number of simulations. The SPED model's slow speed is a bottleneck to performing a large parameter sweep. This is a severe impediment…
The calibration and validation of pedestrian simulations require the acquisition of empirical evidences of human behaviour. The current work presents the results of an experiment focused on the potentially combined effect of counter flow and grouping on pedestrian dynamics. In particular, we focused on: (i) four different configurations of flow ratio (the rate between the minor flow and the total flow in bidirectional scenarios); (ii) dyads, as the most frequently observed and basic social groups of crowds. Results showed that the increase of flow ratio negatively impacted the speed of pedestr…
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…
Social scientists have criticised computer models of pedestrian streams for their treatment of psychological crowds as mere aggregations of individuals. Indeed most models for evacuation dynamics use analogies from physics where pedestrians are considered as particles. Although this ensures that the results of the simulation match important physical phenomena, such as the deceleration of the crowd with increasing density, social phenomena such as group processes are ignored. In particular, people in a crowd have social identities and share those social identities with the others in the crowd. …
