Fundamental diagrams for pedestrian flows in a channel via an extended social force model

Abstract

In this paper, an extended social force model was applied to investigate fundamental diagrams of pedestrian flows. In the presented model, both the static floor field and the view field were taken into account. Then each pedestrian can determine his/her desired walking directions according to both global and local information. The fundamental diagrams were obtained numerically under periodic boundary condition. It was found that the fundamental diagrams show good agreement with the measured data in the case of unidirectional flow, especially in the medium density range. However, the fundamental diagram for the case of bidirectional flow gave larger values than the measured data. Furthermore, the bidirectional flux is larger than the unidirectional flux in a certain density range. It is indicated that the bidirectional flow may be more efficient than the unidirectional flow in some cases. The process of lane formation is quite quick in the model. Typical flow patterns in three scenarios were given to show some realistic applications.