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A modified universal pedestrian motion model: Revisiting pedestrian simulation with bottlenecks

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  • Architecture and Human Behavior
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Abstract

Pedestrian flow through narrow exits is one the most important features of crowd dynamics and evacuation. This is a particularly important aspect of pedestrian simulation models in that the accuracy is highly dependent on their ability to produce realistic exit flow rates. We firstly identified the four parameters that are most critical for physical interactions of the social force model and then calibrated them against two well-controlled pedestrian experiments. With these calibrated parameters, we discussed the reasonable settings of sensitive parameters for different levels of pedestrian competitiveness. Then, we revisited the basic questions about the effect of the exit location, the bottleneck length, and the effect of obstacles on pedestrian egress. Our simulation results indicated that: (1) The effect of the exit location on the pedestrian egress efficiency is uncertain, and the evacuation efficiency is also related to the exit width and the level of urgency. (2) The “pass-way” after the exit also named as the bottleneck length has a negative impact on the evacuation performance only in the scenarios that the bottleneck length is not more than 2.0 meters. When the bottleneck length exceeds 2.0 meters, pedestrian outflow efficiency reaches an asymptotic. (3) Setting an obstacle near an exit is not leading to a longer pedestrian evacuation time, instead, it is effectively improving pedestrian evacuation.

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Acknowledgements

The research was supported from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71871189, No. 72104205, and No. 7197 4161), the Science and Technology Development Funds of Sichuan Province (No. 2020YFS0291), the Open Research Fund of SKLFS (No. HZ2019-KF14), China Scholarship Council, and the transportation research group at The University of Melbourne.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Transportation and Logistics, National Engineering Laboratory of Integrated Transportation Big Data Application Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, China

    Jianyu Wang & Jian Ma

  2. Transport Engineering Group, Melbourne School of Engineering & IT, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3010, Australia

    Jianyu Wang, Majid Sarvi & Abdullah Alhawsawi

  3. Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, Business School, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

    Milad Haghani

  4. Faculty of Geosciences and Environmental Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, China

    Juan Chen & Peng Lin

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  1. Jianyu Wang
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  2. Majid Sarvi
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  4. Milad Haghani
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Correspondence to Jian Ma.

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A modified universal pedestrian motion model: Revisiting pedestrian simulation with bottlenecks

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Wang, J., Sarvi, M., Ma, J. et al. A modified universal pedestrian motion model: Revisiting pedestrian simulation with bottlenecks. Build. Simul. 15, 631–644 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-021-0841-4

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