Experimental study on individual and crowd movement features around obstacles with different shape and size

Abstract

Well-structured pedestrian experiments in a long corridor have been carried out to explore the influence of obstacle shape and size on individual and crowd level pedestrian movement characteristics. Results indicate that for individual pedestrians, the number of right-turning pedestrians and the target drift angle show clear changes with the increase of the obstacle size, while the speed only changes significantly when the obstacle size is greater than 1.5m. For the crowd movement scenarios, a small obstacle can speed up the pedestrian flow, then, with the increase of the obstacle size, the movement time increases. The increase rate has a relation with the obstacle shape. The obstacle shape influence becomes more obvious when the individual and crowd movement scenarios are compared. The results of this paper are expected to provide practical basis for modeling pedestrian under the influence of obstacle.