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 theory, which proves remarkably successful in replicating the aforementioned observations as well as other daily-life situations involving collective behaviour in dense crowds, such as partial metro boarding. This demonstrates the ability of game approaches to capture the anticipatory effects at play in operational crowd dynamics.
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…
Viral transmission in pedestrian crowds: Coupling an open-source code assessing the risks of airborne contagion with diverse pedestrian dynamics models
The increasing number of mass events involving large crowds calls for a better understanding of the dynamics of dense crowds. Inquiring into the possibility of a mechanical description of these dynamics, we experimentally study the crossing of dense static crowds by a cylindrical intruder, a mechanical test which is classical for granular matter. The analysis of our experiments reveals robust features in the crowds' response, comprising both similarities and discrepancies with the response of granular media. Common features include the presence of a depleted region behind the intruder and the …
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…
We report on two series of experiments, conducted in the frame of two different collaborations designed to study how pedestrians adapt their trajectories and velocities in groups or crowds. Strong emphasis is put on the motivations for the chosen protocols and the experimental implementation. The first series deals with pattern formation, interactions between pedestrians, and decision-making in pedestrian groups at low to medium densities. In particular, we show how pedestrians adapt their headways in single-file motion depending on the (prescribed) leader's velocity. The second series of expe…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
This contribution provides a microscopic experimental study of pedestrian motion in front of the bottleneck. Identification of individual pedestrians in conducted experiments enables to explain the high variance of travel time by heterogeneity of the crowd. Some pedestrians are able to push effectively through the crowd, some get trapped in the crowd for significantly longer time. This ability to push through the crowd is associated with the slope of individual linear model of the dependency of the travel time on the number of pedestrians in front of the bottleneck. Further detailed study of t…
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 …
LEMONS: An open-source platform to generate non-circuLar, anthropometry-based pEdestrian shapes and simulate their Mechanical interactiONS in two dimensions
Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Institut Lumière Matière, CNRS（里昂第一大学，光与物质研究所，法国国家科学研究中心）
In this paper, we present a computational modeling approach for the dynamics of human crowds, where the spreading of an emotion (specifically fear) has an influence on the pedestrians' behavior. Our approach is based on the methods of the kinetic theory of active particles. The model allows us to weight between two competing behaviors depending on fear level: the search for less congested areas and the tendency to follow the stream unconsciously (herding). The fear level of each pedestrian influences her walking speed and is influenced by the fear levels of her neighbors. Numerically, we solve…
Elucidating emergent regularities in intriguing crowd dynamics is a fundamental scientific problem arising in multiple fields. In this work, based on the social force model, we simulate the typical scenario of collective escape towards a single exit and reveal the striking analogy of crowd dynamics and crystallisation. With the outflow of the pedestrians, crystalline order emerges in the compact crowd. In this process, the local misalignment and global rearrangement of pedestrians are well rationalized in terms of the characteristic motions of topological defects in the crystal. Exploiting the…
Recent advances in bottleneck studies have highlighted that different architectural adjustments at the exit may reduce the probability of clogging at the exit thereby enhancing the outflow of the individuals. However, those studies are mostly limited to the controlled experiments with non-human organisms or predictions models. Complementary data with human subjects to test the model's limited in literature. This study aims to examine the effect of different geometrical layouts at the exit towards the pedestrian flow via controlled laboratory experiments with human participants. The experimenta…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo（东京大学先端科学技术研究中心）
We conducted a simple experiment in which one pedestrian passed through a crowded area and measured the body-rotational angular velocity with commercial tablets. Then, we developed a new method for predicting crowd density by applying the continuous wavelet transform and machine learning to the data obtained in the experiment. We found that the accuracy of prediction using angular velocity data was as high as that using raw velocity data. Therefore, we concluded that angular velocity has relationship with crowd density and we could estimate crowd density by angular velocity. Our research will …
This paper provides a new perspective to understand existing controversy on the social force model. These issues include that the social force disobeys Newton 3rd Law, oscillation phenomenon when one agent is approaching another as well as some questions on the faster-is-slower effect. From the perspective of physics these problems seems difficult to explain. This paper provides a new perspective to understand these issues. We introduce a new concept of desired interpersonal distance to explain how the social force is generated from conscious mind of human. Although the social force disobeys N…
The goal of this work is to study an infectious disease spreading in a medium size population occupying a confined environment. For this purpose, we consider a kinetic theory approach to model crowd dynamics in bounded domains and couple it to a kinetic equation to model contagion. The interactions of a person with other pedestrians and the environment are modeled by using tools of game theory. The pedestrian dynamics model allows to weight between two competing behaviors: the search for less congested areas and the tendency to follow the stream unconsciously in a panic situation. Each person …
