Asymmetric Effect and Stop-and-go Waves on Single-file Pedestrian Dynamics

Abstract

Based on the typical phenomena of pedestrian movement, an extended optimal velocity model is proposed to analyze and simulate single-file pedestrian movement at high density by considering the differences of interaction force (i.e., attractive force and repulsive force) between pedestrians. A new asymmetric interaction function is introduced to depict the complex behaviours of pedestrian movement. The modified Korteweg-de Vries (mKdV) equation near the critical point is derived by applying the reductive perturbation method, and its kink-antikink soliton solution can better describe the stop-and-go waves of pedestrian flow. The numerical simulations show that the model can really reproduce space-time evolution of headway during the pedestrian movement, and the simulation results are consistent with the theoretical analysis.