Group-walking effect on bidirectional pedestrian flow in a corridor

Abstract

Groups are commonly found in general crowds and their behaviors are distinguished from that of isolated pedestrians. Thus, in recent five years researchers have started to investigate pedestrian group movement. In this paper, we considered group walking effect and introduced group floor field to the traditional floor field model. Furthermore, two different methods of generating group floor field were put forward, i.e. group center generation (method 1 for short) and group leader generation (method 2 for short), and we applied the proposed group model to simulate bidirectional pedestrian flow in a corridor. No matter which method of generating group floor field is adopted, the simulation results show that group members walk slower than singles, and with the group size increasing the transition point from the free flow phase to the jamming has a decrease trend. In addition, it seems that method 2 of generating group floor field makes group more cohesive and stable at the same crowd density than method 1. Afterwards it is found that the crowd with large group size is more easily affected by asymmetric injection rate. At last, people’s walking preference is shortly discussed, and it is obtained that people’s walking preference is also good for group movement from the perspective of movement efficiency.