Modeling Unidirectional Pedestrian Movement: An Investigation of Diffusion Behavior in the Built Environment

Yiming Bie,Ying Liu,Cheng Sun

doi:10.1155/2015/308261

Yiming Bie, Ying Liu + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/308261

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Abstract

Unidirectional pedestrian movement is a special phenomenon in the evacuation process of large public buildings and urban environments at pedestrian scale. Several macroscopic models for collective behaviors have been built to predict pedestrian flow. However, current models do not explain the diffusion behavior in pedestrian crowd movement, which can be important in representing spatial-temporal crowd density differentiation in the movement process. This study builds a macroscopic model for describing crowd diffusion behavior and evaluating unidirectional pedestrian flow. The proposed model employs discretization of time and walking speed in geometric distribution to calculate downstream pedestrian crowd flow and analyze movement process based on upstream number of pedestrians and average walking speed. The simulated results are calibrated with video observation data in a baseball stadium to verify the model precision. Statistical results have verified that the proposed pedestrian diffusion model could accurately describe pedestrian macromovement behavior within the margin of error.

Highlights

IntroductionStudies on pedestrian behavior and movement were mostly empirical, and regression analysis has been widely used for proposing theories, understanding and evaluating design elements of pedestrian facilities, and developing planning guidelines [4]
Diffusion behavior in pedestrian flow commonly exists in unidirectional crowd movement such as during the evacuation process of sports venues, transportation facilities, large public exhibition buildings, and pedestrians walking on roads and pavements in urban and neighborhood scale
Quantifying and describing such diffusion behavior more precisely could allow for analysis of pedestrian movement speed and density effectively in the above facilities, having an important impact on evaluating the circulation performance and egress safety of the facility planning and design

Summary

Introduction

Studies on pedestrian behavior and movement were mostly empirical, and regression analysis has been widely used for proposing theories, understanding and evaluating design elements of pedestrian facilities, and developing planning guidelines [4]. A number of simulation models have been proposed and widely used for the prediction of pedestrian flow in the planning and design process, such. The proposed methodology features discrete-time, geometrical speed distribution and degree of diffusion in relation to speed divergence, which can be used to calculate pedestrian arrival state at any forward position and analyze unidirectional pedestrian walking processes from the macroscopic perspective. The verification results show that the proposed model could accurately describe the pedestrian movement on the passage and makes the macroscopic pedestrian movement modeling approach more realistic by taking diffusion behavior into consideration

Methodology

Experimentation

Conclusion