Abstract
With the development of aging society, the proportion of the old population is ascending continually. The elders facing the challenge of impaired mobility and decreasing flexibility will affect the dynamic characteristics of pedestrian flow. While the study of the evacuation dynamic mainly focuses on the young for the limited experimental conditions. The movement of elderly pedestrians are seldom investigated. However, the comprehensive understanding of the influence of the elders on the pedestrian flow is essential for facility design and evacuation management. Therefore, a series of comparative experiments between the separate elderly group, separate young group and the mixed group (38 elders and 63 young) are carried out to study the movement properties of elderly pedestrians in the bottleneck flow with different compositions quantitatively. The mixture of the elderly and the young makes the efficiency decrease significantly. In the mixed group, the speed of the young pedestrians is lower than that of the elders for the young slow down to avoid collisions. The young kept a certain distance from the elders for the sake of safety, so that the high-density profiles of the mixed group present as long strips. In addition, pedestrians in the mixed group have longer time lapse than that in the separate groups when passing the bottleneck. In the separate groups, the spatial distribution of the nearest neighbour presents as a uniform circle. The spatial distance between the elderly (0.46 m) is bigger than that between the young (0.39 m). While there is no obvious difference in the mixed group. The results can be used in pedestrian modelling, facilities designing and evacuation management for the population with old people.
Highlights
Comprehensive knowledge on pedestrian dynamics is of key importance of facility design and crowd management, especially under some emergencies, such as fire accidents and earthquake
One reason not to be overlooked is that the mixed group has more participants in each run than the separate elderly group
The relation slope of the mixed group is the smallest. It indicates that the mixture of pedestrians in different age limits the increase of the flow rate J with the exit width b
Summary
Comprehensive knowledge on pedestrian dynamics is of key importance of facility design and crowd management, especially under some emergencies, such as fire accidents and earthquake. In response to the change of population structure, more attention should be paid to the study of the passage efficiency and the safety of pedestrians in public facilities. Few works were made to consider the influence of elderly pedestrians and crowd compositions on pedestrian dynamics [4, 5]. Bottleneck structure is a key position of traffic facilities that restricts the efficiency of pedestrian passage [6]. It has been paid much attention on the dynamics properties of pedestrian flow through the bottleneck [7], including controlled experiments and simulation model.
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