Study on Heterogeneous Pedestrian Dynamics with Improved Social Force Model

Abstract

Pedestrian crowd dynamics is influenced by various factors, such as walkway width, travel purpose, number of pedestrians, direction composition, etc. However, most research on pedestrian simulation models regard pedestrians as homogeneous individuals with the same attributes and having the same behavior strategy. This hypothesis develops a simulation model that is easy to understand and compute, but it neglects the influence of individual differences on crowd dynamics. Based on the social-forces model, the authors developed a heterogeneity pedestrian activity model in an agent framework. Different simulation test scenarios were designed for the comparison study of homogeneous and heterogeneous crowd dynamics, and how pedestrian attribute differentiation influences crowd dynamics is discussed. The simulation test results indicate that the heterogeneous mechanism has significant effects on crowd dynamics. For bi-directional pedestrian flow in a walkway, the speed of flow is decreases with the introduction of heterogeneous pedestrians. For uni-directional pedestrians blocked in a bottleneck, compared with homogeneous groups, heterogeneous pedestrian flows are faster to break through the bottleneck congestion situation; even when the average speed of the heterogeneous groups is lower, the total time consumed in the bottleneck is shorter than the homogeneous group.