Design and analysis of control strategies for pedestrian flows

Molyneaux, Nicholas; Scarinci, Riccardo; Bierlaire, Michel

doi:10.1007/s11116-020-10111-1

Cited by 21 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…According to [ 7 ], a dynamic pedestrian management system consists of two components: a guiding strategy and the crowd. Guiding strategies are defined by their objectives and by the measures taken to achieve the objectives.…”

Section: Design Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Guiding crowds when facing limited compliance: Simulating strategies

Mayr

Köster²

2022

PLoS ONE

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At traffic hubs, it is important to avoid congestion of pedestrian streams to ensure safety and a good level of service. This presents a challenge, since distributing crowds on different routes is much more difficult than opening valves to, for example, regulate fluid flow. Humans may or may not comply with re-directions suggested to them typically with the help of signage, loudspeakers, apps, or by staff. This remains true, even if they perceive and understand the suggestions. Yet, simulation studies so far have neglected the influence of compliance. In view of this, we complement a state-of-the-art model of crowd motion and crowd behavior, so that we can vary the compliance rate. We consider an abstracted scenario that is inspired by a metro station in the city of Munich, where traffic regulators wish to make some passengers abandon the obviously shortest route so that the flow evens out. We investigate the effect of compliance for two very simple guiding strategies. In the first strategy, we alternate routes. In the second strategy, we recommend the path with the lowest crowd density. We observe that, in both cases, it suffices to reroute a small fraction of the crowd to reduce travel times. But we also find that taking densities into account is much more efficient when facing low compliance rates.

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Section: Design Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The travel time per agent is the time it takes to reach the destination. In our evaluations, we look at the median travel time as in [ 7 ].…”

Section: Design Of the Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Guiding crowds when facing limited compliance: Simulating strategies

Mayr

Köster²

2022

PLoS ONE

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“…The probabilities of being assigned stations B and C are 15%. It is worth noting again that this setting has a distinct feature that seperates Mini-Dome from other models [8,9,[13][14][15]: agents' destintaions are randomly determined and cannot be adjusted in order to shorten the evacuationt time. This means that an optimal evacuation strategy will need to consider the random nature of agents' destinations.…”

Section: Area Exits: Train Stations and Business Facilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Individual decision-making processes have been proven to be vital for evacuation, with the exit choice being one of most well-studied options [12][13][14]. Applying dynamic control strategies to influence pedestrians' decisions has now been considered as a viable choice [15]. This may include providing instructions to pedestrians via various devices [14], as well as more traditional options like using road signs and volunteers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimising Pedestrian Flow Around Large Stadiums

et al. 2021

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This study proposes a method that combines the cellular automaton model and the differential evolution algorithm for optimising pedestrian flow around large stadiums. A miniature version of a large stadium and its surrounding areas is constructed via the cellular automaton model. Special mechanisms are applied to influence the behaviour of an agent that leaves from a certain stadium gate. The agent may be attracted to a nearby business facility and/or guided to uncongested areas. The differential evolution algorithm is then used to determine the optimal probabilities of the influencing agents for each stadium gate. The main goal is to reduce the evacuation time, and other goals such as reducing the costs for the influencing agents’ behaviours and the individual evacuation time are also considered. We found that, although they worked differently in different scenarios, the attraction and guidance of agents significantly reduced the evacuation time. The optimal evacuation time was achieved with moderate attraction to the business facilities and strong guidance to the detouring route. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can provide a goal-dependent, exit-specific strategy that is otherwise hard to acquire for optimising pedestrian flow.

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“…However, in spite of the increased importance attributed to real-time pedestrian data and the need to elaborate strategies based on actual conditions, research on pedestrian dynamics has given little attention to this emerging reality. Although some studies did consider the use of real-time pedestrian positions to optimize evacuations in case of accidents [ 24 – 26 ], to the knowledge of the authors, only a few attempted to reduce risks and/or improve pedestrian comfort during normal operation [ 27 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A system for efficient egress scheduling during mass events and small-scale experimental demonstration

et al. 2020

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Improvements in the design of pedestrian facilities have reduced the frequency of crowd accidents, and safety is now generally ensured in well-planned crowd events. However, congestion and inefficient use of infrastructures still remain an issue. To guarantee comfort and reduce close contacts between people, there are circumstances when crowd density may have to be reduced well below safety limits. Although research has given a lot of attention to extreme scenarios, methods to improve non-critical conditions have been little explored. In addition, crowd sensing technology is still mostly used for data collection and direct use on crowd management is rare. In this work, we present a system aimed at computing optimal egress time for groups of people leaving a complex facility. We show that, if egress starting time is accurately computed for each group based on actual crowd conditions, density can be greatly reduced without having a large effect on the total egress time of the whole crowd. To show the efficacy of such a system, a small-scale experiment is conducted where all components are tested in a simple scenario. As a result, an increase in total egress time by only 5% allowed to reduce maximum density by 35%.

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Design and analysis of control strategies for pedestrian flows

Cited by 21 publications

References 87 publications

Guiding crowds when facing limited compliance: Simulating strategies

Guiding crowds when facing limited compliance: Simulating strategies

Optimising Pedestrian Flow Around Large Stadiums

A system for efficient egress scheduling during mass events and small-scale experimental demonstration

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