In this work the results of a bottleneck experiment with pedestrians are presented in the form of total times, fluxes, specific fluxes, and time gaps. A main aim was to find the dependence of these values from the bottleneck width. The results show a linear decline of the specific flux with increasing width as long as only one person at a time can pass, and a constant value for larger bottleneck widths. Differences between small (one person at a time) and wide bottlenecks (two persons at a time) were also found in the distribution of time gaps.
Robust statistical features have emerged from the microscopic analysis of dense pedestrian flows through a bottleneck, notably with respect to the time gaps between successive passages. We pinpoint the mechanisms at the origin of these features thanks to simple models that we develop and analyse quantitatively. We disprove the idea that anticorrelations between successive time gaps (i.e., an alternation between shorter ones and longer ones) are a hallmark of a zipper-like intercalation of pedestrian lines and show that they simply result from the possibility that pedestrians from distinct 'lin…
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…
With the increase of the elderly and disabled in the world, the characteristics of pedestrian flow mixed with wheelchair users has being paid more and more attention. In this study, experiments in funnel-shaped bottlenecks were performed to study the impact of bottleneck shape and the ratio of wheelchair users on the crowd dynamics. It is found that the increase of wheelchairs in the crowd obviously leads to worse moving efficiency and congestion from the escape time, time-space relationship and time headway. Under low mixing ratios (<2.35%), less congestion occurred in the 45° bottleneck amon…
Experiments with pedestrians could depend strongly on initial conditions. Comparisons of the results of such experiments require to distinguish carefully between transient state and steady state. In this work, a feasible algorithm - Cumulative Sum Control Chart - is proposed and improved to automatically detect steady states from density and speed time series of bottleneck experiments. The threshold of the detection parameter in the algorithm is calibrated using an autoregressive model. Comparing the detected steady states with previous manually selected ones, the modified algorithm gives more…
This contribution presents experimental study of two-dimensional pedestrian flow with the aim to capture the pedestrian behaviour within the cluster formed in front of the bottleneck. Two experiments of passing through a room with one entrance and one exit were arranged according to phase transition study in Ezaki et al. (2012), the inflow rate was regulated to obtain different walking modes. By means of automatic image processing, pedestrians' paths are extracted from camera records to get actual velocity and local density. Macroscopic information is extracted by means of virtual detector and…
The existence of bottlenecks often leads to the stagnation of pedestrian gatherings, which seriously affects the efficiency of traffic and reduces the flow of pedestrians. Some studies have shown that setting devices in front of bottlenecks can promote pedestrian evacuation under certain conditions. In this paper, the effect of setting diversion devices in front of the exit on pedestrian flow is studied. From our observation, these diversion devices can form a buffer zone before the exit and affect pedestrian behaviors. The evacuation times are found to decrease as the devices became farther a…
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…
For safety reasons, it is important that the design of buildings and public facilities comply with the guidelines compiled in building codes.The latter are often premised on the concept of exit capacity, \emph{i.e.}, the mean pedestrian flow rate through a bottleneck (at congestion). Here, we argue that one should duly take into account the evacuation time fluctuations when devising these guidelines. This is particularly true when the narrowing isabrupt and the crowd may behave competitively. We suggest a simple way to assess the extent of (part of) these fluctuations on the basis of the stati…
This article studies clogging phenomena using a velocity-based model for pedestrian dynamics. First, a method to identify prolonged clogs in simulations was introduced. Then bottleneck simulations were implemented with different initial and boundary conditions. The number of prolonged clogs was analyzed to investigate the decisive factors causing this phenomenon. Moreover, the time lapse between two consecutive agents passing the exit, and the trajectories of agents were analyzed. The influence of three types of factors was studied: parameters of the spatial boundaries, algorithmic factors rel…
Pedestrian behaviours tend to depend on the type of facility. Therefore accurate predictions of pedestrians movements in complex geometries (including corridor, bottleneck or intersection) are difficult to achieve for classical models with few parameters. Artificial neural networks have multiple parameters and are able to identify various types of patterns. They could be a suitable alternative for forecasts. We aim in this paper to present first steps testing this approach. We compare estimations of pedestrian speed with a classical model and a neural network for combinations of corridor and b…
This contribution provides microscopic experimental study of pedestrian motion in front of the bottleneck, explains the high variance of individual travel time by the statistical analysis of trajectories. The analysis shows that this heterogeneity increases with increasing occupancy. Some participants were able to reach lower travel time due more efficient path selection and more aggressive behavior within the crowd. Based on this observations, linear model predicting travel time with respect to the aggressiveness of pedestrian is proposed.
Restrictions of pedestrian flow could be triggered by directional changes, merging of streams and other changes or disturbances causing effects similar to bottlenecks given by geometrical narrowings. In this contribution we analyze empirically how the types of the changes or disturbances influence the capacity of a facility. For this purpose four types of facilities including a short narrowing, a long narrowing, a corner and a T-junction are investigated. It is found that the reduction of pedestrian flow depends on the shape and the length of the narrowing. The maximum observed flow of the cor…
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…
We study the dynamics of pedestrian evacuations through a narrow doorway by means of controlled experiments. The influence of the pedestrians' behaviours is investigated by prescribing a selfish attitude to a fraction c\_s of the participants, while the others behave politely. Thanks to an original setup enabling the re-injection of egressed participants into the room, the analysis is conducted in a (macroscopically) quasi-stationary regime. We find that, as c\_s is increased, the flow rate J rises, interpolating between published values for egresses in normal conditions and measurements for c…
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…
We numerically study the impact of impulse stops on pedestrian flow for a straight corridor with multiple attractions. The impulse stop is simulated by the switching behavior model, a function of the social influence strength and the number of attendees near the attraction. When the pedestrian influx is low, one can observe a stable flow where attendees make a complete stop at an attraction and then leave the attraction after a certain amount of time. When the pedestrian influx is high, an unstable flow is observed for strong social influence. In the unstable flow, attendees near the attractio…
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…
In this paper we investigate effects of boundary conditions on one dimensional pedestrian flow which involves purely longitudinal interactions. Qualitatively, stop-and-go waves are observed under closed boundary condition and dissolve when the boundary is open. To get more detailed information the fundamental diagrams of the open and closed systems are compared using Voronoi-based measurement method. Higher maximal specific flow is observed from the pedestrian movement at open boundary condition.
Many agent based simulation approaches have been proposed for pedestrian flow. As such models are applied e.g.\ in evacuation studies, the quality and reliability of such models is of vital interest. Pedestrian trajectories are functional data and thus functional principal component analysis is a natural tool to asses the quality of pedestrian flow models beyond average properties. In this article we conduct functional PCA for the trajectories of pedestrians passing through a bottleneck. We benchmark two agent based models of pedestrian flow against the experimental data using PCA average and …
In this paper, the impact of holding umbrella on the uni- and bi-directional flow has been investigated via experiment and modeling. In the experiments, pedestrians are required to walk clockwise/anti-clockwise in a ring-shaped corridor under normal situation and holding umbrella situation. No matter in uni- or bi-directional flow, the flow rate under holding umbrella situation decreases comparing with that in normal situation. In bidirectional flow, pedestrians segregate into two opposite moving streams very quickly under normal situation, and clockwise/anti-clockwise walking pedestrians are …
We numerically study jamming transitions in pedestrian flow interacting with an attraction, mostly based on the social force model for pedestrians who can join the attraction. We formulate the joining probability as a function of social influence from others, reflecting that individual choice behavior is likely influenced by others. By controlling pedestrian influx and the social influence parameter, we identify various pedestrian flow patterns. For the bidirectional flow scenario, we observe a transition from the free flow phase to the freezing phase, in which oppositely walking pedestrians r…
In this article the dynamics of pedestrian streams in four different scenarios are compared empirically to investigate the influence of boundary conditions on it. The Voronoi method, which allows high resolution and small fluctuations of measured density in time and space, is used to analyze the experiments. It is found that pedestrian movement in systems with different boundary conditions (open, periodic boundary conditions and outflow restrained) presents various characteristics especially when the density is larger than 2 m-2. In open corridor systems the specific flow increases continuousl…
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 …
Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS), Forschungszentrum Jülich（先进模拟研究所，于利希研究中心）；Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Wuppertal（人文与社会科学学院，伍珀塔尔大学）；Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering, University of Wuppertal（建筑与土木工程学院，伍珀塔尔大学）
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…
Despite the vast amount of studies on pedestrian flow, the data concerning high densities are still very inadequate. We organize one large-scale pedestrian flow experiment on a ring corridor. With 278 participants, the density as high as 9 m^(-2) is reached. In the uni-directional flow, four different states are observed, including the free flow, congested state, over-congested state and hyper-congested state. The features of the hyper-congested state are similar to the "crowd turbulence" reported in the empirical data of Helbing et al., and the transition between the stopped state and the mov…
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…
Real-life, out-of-laboratory, measurements of pedestrian movements allow extensive and fully-resolved statistical analyses. However, data acquisition in real-life is subjected to the wide heterogeneity that characterizes crowd flows over time. Disparate flow conditions, such as co-flows and counter-flows at low and at high pedestrian densities, typically follow randomly one another. When analysing the data in order to study the dynamics and behaviour of pedestrians it is crucial to be able disentangle and to properly select (query) data from statistically homogeneous flow conditions in order t…
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 …
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…
Employing partially overlapping overhead \kinectTMS sensors and automatic pedestrian tracking algorithms we recorded the crowd traffic in a rectilinear section of the main walkway of Eindhoven train station on a 24/7 basis. Beside giving access to the train platforms (it passes underneath the railways), the walkway plays an important connection role in the city. Several crowding scenarios occur during the day, including high- and low-density dynamics in uni- and bi-directional regimes. In this paper we discuss our recording technique and we illustrate preliminary data analyses. Via fundamental…
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…
