Abstract
The avoidance behavior of pedestrians was characterized in the present paper by simulating the movement of crowds in both unidirectional and bidirectional pedestrian flow. A phase change of alternative lane formation observed in real bidirectional pedestrian flows has been studied, where pedestrians tended to evade individuals in counterflow and simultaneously keep a certain distance from each other in the uniform pedestrian flow when the counterflow disappeared. What is more, the comparison between the effect of evading and pushing behavior on evacuation has been investigated in the room egress scenario. Additionally, the evading and overtaking behavior of fast pedestrians have also been simulated in heterogeneous crowds. The performance of the proposed model was compared to the experimental data and the results obtained using other evacuation models. Numerical results showed that both the phase change of alternative lane formation in bidirectional pedestrian flow and the effective evading behavior in unidirectional pedestrian flow were conductive to reduce the evacuation time of pedestrian crowds. Even though pushing behavior of fast pedestrians seemed to improve the flow through the wide exit, it might lead to the panic and other negative effect on the crowds, such as crowds trample. The proposed model in this paper could provide a theoretical basis for the pedestrian crowd management during emergency evacuation.
Highlights
Nowadays, the gathering of pedestrian crowds becomes widespread in public places, such as stations, stadiums, shopping malls, etc. [1]
A thermostatted kinetic theory [9] was newly employed for describing the pedestrian crowd dynamics into a metro station with multiple exits
The pedestrian flow pattern of alternative pedestrian lane formation in the bidirectional pedestrian flow after the interaction of the counterflows that was predicted by the proposed model agreed better with that recorded in reality
Summary
The gathering of pedestrian crowds becomes widespread in public places, such as stations, stadiums, shopping malls, etc. [1]. The combination of an interaction force between pedestrians and the navigation force of the guider was introduced in an extended social force model to study the influence of guiders in the case of emergency evacuation [5]. Mathematical Problems in Engineering factors that drive both individual behavior and the formation of collective patterns in the crowd, such as overtaking behavior in unidirectional flow [12] and the lane formation phenomenon in counterflow [13]. The pedestrians experience spatial separation, aggregation, and reseparation of alternative lanes through individual interactions with the counterflow These repetitious phase changes are commonly found in real bidirectional pedestrian flows in reality and merit the further study. The proposed model could be used to describe the evading and overtaking behavior in a nature way by the introduced collision avoidance mechanism
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