An approach to congestion analysis in crowd dynamics models

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to quantitatively analyzing pedestrian congestion in evacuation management based on the Hughes and social force models. An accurate analysis of crowds plays an important role in illustrating their dynamics. However, the majority of the existing approaches to analyzing pedestrian congestion are qualitative. Few methods focus on the quantification of the interactions between crowds and individual pedestrians. According to the proposed approach, analytic tools derived from theoretical mechanics are applied to provide a multiscale representation of such interactions. In particular, we introduce movement constraints that illustrate the macroscopic and microscopic states of crowds. Furthermore, we consider pressure propagation and changes in the position of pedestrians during the evacuation process to improve the accuracy of the analysis. The generalized force caused by the varied density of pedestrians is applied to calculate the final congestion. Numerical simulations demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach.