The empirical relation between density and velocity of pedestrian movement is not completely analyzed, particularly with regard to the `microscopic' causes which determine the relation at medium and high densities. The simplest system for the investigation of this dependency is the normal movement of pedestrians along a line (single-file movement). This article presents experimental results for this system under laboratory conditions and discusses the following observations: The data show a linear relation between the velocity and the inverse of the density, which can be regarded as the required length of one pedestrian to move. Furthermore we compare the results for the single-file movement with literature data for the movement in a plane. This comparison shows an unexpected conformance between the fundamental diagrams, indicating that lateral interference has negligible influence on the velocity-density relation at the density domain $1 m^{-2}<ρ<5 m^{-2}$. In addition we test a procedure for automatic recording of pedestrian flow characteristics. We present preliminary results on measurement range and accuracy of this method.
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 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 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…
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…
In order to investigate collective effects of interactions between pedestrians and attractions, this study extends the social force model. Such interactions lead pedestrians to form stable clusters around attractions, or even to rush into attractions if the interaction becomes stronger. It is also found that for high pedestrian density and intermediate interaction strength, some pedestrians rush into attractions while others move to neighboring attractions. These collective patterns of pedestrian movements or phases and transitions between them are systematically presented in a phase diagram. …
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…
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 …
Lane formation in bidirectional pedestrian streams is based on a stimulus-response mechanism and strategies of navigation in a fast-changing environment. Although microscopic models that only guarantee volume exclusion can qualitatively reproduce this phenomenon, they are not sufficient for a quantitative description. To quantitatively describe this phenomenon, a minimal anticipatory collision-free velocity model is introduced. Compared to the original velocity model, the new model reduces the occurrence of gridlocks and reproduces the movement of pedestrians more realistically. For a quantita…
The collision-free velocity model is a microscopic pedestrian model, which despite its simplicity, reproduces fairly well several self-organization phenomena in pedestrian dynamics. The model consists of two components: a direction sub-model that combines individual desired moving direction and neighbor's influence to imitate the process of navigating in a two-dimensional space, and an intrinsically collision-free speed sub-model which controls the speed of the agents with respect to the distance to their neighbors. In this paper we generalize the collision-free velocity model by introducing t…
To better design safe and comfortable urban spaces, understanding the nature of human crowd movement is important. However, precise interactions among pedestrians are difficult to measure in the presence of their complex decision-making processes and many related factors. While extensive studies on pedestrian flow through bottlenecks and corridors have been conducted, the dominant mode of interaction in these scenarios may not be relevant in different scenarios. Here, we attempt to decipher the factors that affect human reactions to other individuals from a different perspective. We conducted …
Bridging the gap between micro-economics and micro-mobility: a two-dimensional risk-based microscopic model of pedestrians' and bicyclists' operational behaviors
The aging of population is a social phenomenon in the world. In this study, series of controlled experiments were performed to investigate the movement characteristics of elderly pedestrians passing through bottlenecks. Similar self-organized phenomena to that of the young like 'zipper effect' and 'lane formation' are observed. The highest local density that appears in front of the exit in the experiment is beyond 4 m-2. The time lapse between two consecutive pedestrians of the elderly is about 0.2 s longer than that of the young when the width is 0.5 m and 0.7 m. Besides, the difference decre…
Understanding on children's movement characteristics is significant to improve their safety levels especially under emergencies. In this work, we performed laboratory experiment to investigate the dynamics of preschool children passing through bottlenecks under high movement motivation. It is found that the relations between flow and bottleneck width for adults and children can be unified when the body size and movement motivation are considered in certain way. High movement motivation leads to competition among pedestrians, which results in different spatial-temporal distribution of the densi…
