Unidirectional and bidirectional flow in a narrow corridor with body rotation

Daichi Yanagisawa,Claudio Feliciani,Katsuhiro Nishinari

doi:10.17815/cd.2020.37

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a new pedestrian model, where pedestrians are represented with three circles and rotate their body to avoid others. In most pedestrian models, the body posture of pedestrians is statically connected with the walking direction; however, they may become different in our model, in other words, pedestrians can walk sideways. We conducted simulation on bidirectional flow in a narrow corridor where body rotation is necessary to avoid collisions and succeeded to reproduce realistic fundamental diagram.

Highlights

Straight sections are common features in many facilities accommodating pedestrian traffic.Corridors, walkways or crosswalks are the most representative example of this class of structures
There are two types of flow situations which are possible in such straight sections: unidirectional and bidirectional flow
Body rotation is considered in some pedestrian models, the body posture of pedestrians is statically connected with the walking direction, pedestrians do not walk sideways [18, 19]

Summary

Introduction

Straight sections are common features in many facilities accommodating pedestrian traffic. Lane changing is less frequent in the case of vehicles (compared to pedestrians), we consider that a group of pedestrians moving in a corridor can be viewed in the same way as vehicles moving over a multi-lanes highway In both cases, the fundamental diagram is not much different from the single-file dynamics [2], with the case of bicycles showing strikingly similar characteristics [3]. A theoretical study [15] managed to highlight the different properties of the uni- and bidirectional fundamental diagram, and the authors were able to describe both fundamental diagrams analytically Corridor width in these studies is much larger than the sum of the shoulder width of two pedestrians, pedestrians can avoid others by changing their walking direction if density is not very large. We consider that pedestrians rotate their body and decrease their effective width by walking sideways when they need to avoid collisions with opponent pedestrians; we implemented such mechanism in our model

Walking speed function without body rotation

Conclusion