Experimental study of the walking behavior of crowds mixed with slow-speed pedestrians as an introductory study of elderly-mixed evacuation crowds

Abstract

In conventional evacuation modeling, evacuation crowds are regarded as consisting of pedestrians with almost homogeneous walking abilities. However, there are many people who are slow-footed, especially people, and usually evacuation crowds consist of a mixture of diverse speed of pedestrians. Not only are slow-speed pedestrians themselves slow, but the mixture of slow-speed and average pedestrians whose walking behavior fit in the basic density-velocity fundamental diagrams increase the complexity of crowd behavior. This research examined the characteristics of slow-speed pedestrians mixed in an evacuation crowd through a parametric evacuation experiment. Walking behaviors on a simple straight 12.6 m path are examined. Compared with a no-slow-speed pedestrian crowd, the overall flow rate on the 1.2 m wide path decreased to 71% for the 10% slow-speed-pedestrian mixed case and to 61% for the 20% case. Analysis of the trajectories of average pedestrians in relative coordinates based on the speed of slow-speed pedestrians revealed that the behavior when passing the slow-speed pedestrians was strongly governed by the density of pedestrians and the percentage of slow-speed pedestrians. To consider the safety of diverse people today, these aspects should be well reproduced through evacuation analysis.