Analysis of Impact of Group Walking Patterns on Pedestrian Evacuation

Abstract

An understanding of the walking patterns of groups of pedestrians in an evacuation is critical for the establishment of policies, procedures, and organizational structures to respond effectively to emergencies. Groups of pedestrians compose a crowd in which pedestrian motions are significantly constrained to maintain cohesion. On the basis of behavior theory, this paper proposes a multiagent model for the simulation of crowds of pedestrians. The main innovative aspect of this model is the genuine representation of the patterns of movement of groups of pedestrians. Patterns of movement consisting of the line-abreast pattern, the chain pattern, and the mixed pattern were investigated, and their influences on evacuations were evaluated quantitatively by taking into account the discrepant densities, disparate distributions of the proportions of pedestrian groups of different sizes, and heterogeneous velocities of groups of pedestrians. The simulation results show that the walking patterns of groups of pedestrians have a significant influence on the dynamics of pedestrian evacuation. The chain pattern was safer when the time of evacuation under high-density conditions was considered, and the mixed pattern had a better performance under moderate-density conditions. Moreover, the influence of patterns of movement was distinct with different distributions of pedestrian groups of different sizes; the chain pattern had the highest evacuation efficiency among the three patterns of pedestrian movement. In addition, a homogeneous velocity condition had a higher evacuation efficiency than a heterogeneous velocity condition. Thus, a chain pattern with a homogeneous velocity is recommended as the optimal pattern of movement in pedestrian evacuations when the safety and efficiency of plans and designs for the evacuation of pedestrian traffic with the different patterns of movement are considered.

Social groups barely change the speed-density relationship in unidirectional pedestrian flow, but affect operational behaviours

“…At the microscopic level, we confirm that the free speed of our simulated social groups is smaller than that of individuals, as expected from previous studies [26]. This is likely due to the fact that in contrast to the unconstrained and flexible motion of individuals, group members are constrained by others, and they need to cooperate with each other to move (especially in our experiments where group members walk arm in arm).…”

“…The typical walking speed of pedestrians is very important in transport, as it directly determines the flow through facilities or the egress time in evacuations. Previous work suggests that group speed decreases with social group size [26], but others suggest that the speed of triads is larger than the speed of dyads and that the speed of individuals is higher than that of social groups, additionally depending on the walking purpose [27] or even gender [28]. The spatial structure adopted by social groups appears to arise from a trade-off between maintaining cohesion and facilitating communication against the need to avoid collisions with other pedestrians.…”

Adaptive Social Planner to Accompany People in Real-Life Dynamic Environments

“…Due to occlusions, it may be challenging to track all members of a large group, and communicative interaction among all members would be difficult. Thus, it is natural to focus on a specific limited implementation to groups of 2 or 3 components, as larger groups tend to split into two and three people subgroups [8,9,77]. We would like to emphasize that both implemented methods in this paper can be easily extended to accompany groups of more than 3 members.…”

Simulation Model of Crowd Evacuation Navigation in a Multi-Obstacle Environment

“…Pengfei Zhao et al proposed a multiagent model for the simulation of crowds of pedestrians. The main innovative aspect of this model is the genuine representation of the patterns of movement of groups of pedestrians ( 12 ). Pelechano N et al present an animating evacuation algorithm in complex buildings by crowds who might not know the structure’s connectivity, or who find routes accidentally blocked ( 13 ).…”