Pedestrian flow characteristics through bends: Effects of angle and desired speed

Jiahua Zhang,Charitha Dias,Majid Sarvi,Miho Iryo Asano

doi:10.17815/cd.2020.89

Jiahua Zhang, Charitha Dias + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.17815/cd.2020.89

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Abstract

This study quantitatively described how the desired speed, which may reflect the emergency level, and the angle of bend affect the pedestrian flow by comparing fundamental diagrams derived from trajectory data collected through laboratory experiments. Results showed that the slow running (≈ 2.8 m/s speed) can increase the maximum flow through a bend by around 60 % compared to normal walking (≈ 1.4 m/s speed) regardless of the turning angle. Further, it was found that the turning angle of the bend has a stronger negative impact on the moving speed of crowds under running conditions. Compared to the turning angle, congestion level seemed to have a minor impact on the average moving speed through the bends. On the other hand, for 90° and 180° bends, the variations of the speed were observed to decrease with the increase of density which indicated that although congestion level deteriorated the flow conditions at bends, it homogenized the collective moving speed of pedestrians.

Highlights

As experimentally verified in previous studies [1,2], corridors with bends are inefficient for crowd movements and could become bottlenecks under emergency as well as normal conditions
This study aims to quantitatively describe how the desired speed and the angle of bend affect the pedestrian flow characteristics by comparing fundamental diagrams derived from trajectory data
This indicates that slow speed running could probably increase the efficiency of bends by around 60% compared to normal speed walking

Summary

Introduction

As experimentally verified in previous studies [1,2], corridors with bends are inefficient for crowd movements and could become bottlenecks under emergency as well as normal conditions. The measurement results from this experiment could be used to estimate the capacity of bends with different angles under different situations (i.e., normal or evacuation); on the other hand, the findings from this study could be beneficial for the validation and calibration of crowd simulation models. 2. Experiment Setup The data used for this study were collected from an experiment conducted at Monash University in October 2013 [2]. Trajectory data for walking through a straight (0°) and different angled (45°, 90° and 180°) corridors (corridor width is 1.5 m) were collected under two different desired speed levels, i.e., normal speed walking (individual speed ≈ 1.4 m/s) and slow speed running (individual speed ≈ 2.8 m/s). The positions of each pedestrian’s head were manually tracked at 0.12 s intervals from video recordings to obtain trajectories of individuals

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