Insights Toward Characteristics of Merging Streams of Pedestrian Crowds Based on Experiments with Panicked Ants

Shahhoseini, Zahra; Sarvi, Majid; Saberi, Meead

doi:10.3141/2561-10

Cited by 26 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…BACKGROUND From a behavioural understanding and modelling point of view, pedestrian crowd flow has been considered in the literature from different angles. Some studies have been dedicated to the understanding of certain phenomena that emerge from crowd collective motion (such as panic, stampede, fasteris-slower effect; stop-and-go and social group effect to name a few) [3,[10][11][12][13]. Some other studies, however, including the current work, have focused on the behaviour of individual pedestrians in a crowd.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedestrian crowd tactical‐level decision making during emergency evacuations

Haghani

Sarvi

2016

J of Advced Transportation

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This paper investigates pedestrian crowd tactical-level decision making during emergency evacuations. Of particular interest is crowd exit-choice behaviour. Two sources of stated choice data are collected and combined. One data set is derived from an experiment linked to a real-life exit choice experience of participants (in a non-evacuation setting). We examine aspects that have often been taken for granted in the literature in connection with egress behaviour of crowds during emergencies. We quantify evacuees' trade-off between "distance", "density", "exit visibility" and "directional density" as well as the interactive effect between exit visibility and tendency to follow others. A comprehensive random-utility analysis is conducted ranging from traditionally practiced models to the state-of-the-practice methods such as random-coefficient nested logit. Our findings suggest that (i) unless evacuees face certain levels of uncertainty in the escape environment; flows of crowd are unlikely to be followed. Otherwise, most evacuees perceive other individuals as potential sources of congestion and extra delay (generalisation to situations where crowd is completely unfamiliar with the egress geometry, however, may require careful scrutiny). (ii) Evacuees mostly prefer visible exits over the exits whose congestion level is unknown to them (i.e. the tendency to minimise ambiguity). (iii) The presence of attribute uncertainty (e.g. exit visibility) significantly changes the impact of observing decisions of others on each individual choice maker. We also found out that (iv) spatial distribution of exits has a significant influence on evacuees' decisions (presenting itself in the form of violating the IIA assumption). (v) The marginal weights that different individuals place upon attributes of exits are significantly heterogeneous. (vi) There is meaningful correlation between certain utility weights of individual evacuees. These behavioural findings can provide significant behavioural insight essential for safe evacuation planning and accurate forecast of evacuees' behaviour.All other model estimation results were obtained from NLOGIT 5.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pedestrian crowd tactical‐level decision making during emergency evacuations

Haghani

Sarvi

2016

J of Advced Transportation

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“…Empirical evidences on merging movements were not sufficient before the year of 2014 [4,58,159,160]. There was a burst of empirical studies on merging behaviors in the most recent four years [3,[161][162][163][164][165][166][167][168].…”

Section: Merging and Divergingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Later, Shahhoseini et al (2016) conducted ants experiments to further understand the merging angle effects (60 ∘ , 90 ∘ , and 120 ∘ ) [164]. They found the negative effects of merging angle in ant trials in panic situation.…”

Section: Merging and Divergingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A State-of-the-Art Review on Empirical Data Collection for External Governed Pedestrians Complex Movement

Shi

Shiwakoti

et al. 2018

Journal of Advanced Transportation

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Complex movement patterns of pedestrian traffic, ranging from unidirectional to multidirectional flows, are frequently observed in major public infrastructure such as transport hubs. These multidirectional movements can result in increased number of conflicts, thereby influencing the mobility and safety of pedestrian facilities. Therefore, empirical data collection on pedestrians’ complex movement has been on the rise in the past two decades. Although there are several reviews of mathematical simulation models for pedestrian traffic in the existing literature, a detailed review examining the challenges and opportunities on empirical studies on the pedestrians complex movements is limited in the literature. The overall aim of this study is to present a systematic review on the empirical data collection for uni- and multidirectional crowd complex movements. We first categorized the complex movements of pedestrian crowd into two general categories, namely, external governed movements and internal driven movements based on the interactions with the infrastructure and among pedestrians, respectively. Further, considering the hierarchy of movement complexity, we decomposed the externally governed movements of pedestrian traffic into several unique movement patterns including straight line, turning, egress and ingress, opposing, weaving, merging, diverging, and random flows. Analysis of the literature showed that empirical data were highly rich in straight line and egress flow while medium rich in turning, merging, weaving, and opposing flows, but poor in ingress, diverging, and random flows. We put emphasis on the need for the future global collaborative efforts on data sharing for the complex crowd movements.

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“…By comparing flow rates and velocity in angled corridors versus straight corridors, they found that the presence of turning angle greater than 45° can considerably decrease the flee times and output rate, particularly under high-density situations. another study[ 31 ] examined the effect of corridor configuration in merging passages using ant models of collective motion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective movements of pedestrians: How we can learn from simple experiments with non-human (ant) crowds

Shahhoseini

Sarvi

2017

PLoS ONE

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IntroductionUnderstanding collective behavior of moving organisms and how interactions between individuals govern their collective motion has triggered a growing number of studies. Similarities have been observed between the scale-free behavioral aspects of various systems (i.e. groups of fish, ants, and mammals). Investigation of such connections between the collective motion of non-human organisms and that of humans however, has been relatively scarce. The problem demands for particular attention in the context of emergency escape motion for which innovative experimentation with panicking ants has been recently employed as a relatively inexpensive and non-invasive approach. However, little empirical evidence has been provided as to the relevance and reliability of this approach as a model of human behaviour.MethodsThis study explores pioneer experiments of emergency escape to tackle this question and to connect two forms of experimental observations that investigate the collective movement at macroscopic level. A large number of experiments with human and panicking ants are conducted representing the escape behavior of these systems in crowded spaces. The experiments share similar architectural structures in which two streams of crowd flow merge with one another. Measures such as discharge flow rates and the probability distribution of passage headways are extracted and compared between the two systems.FindingsOur findings displayed an unexpected degree of similarity between the collective patterns emerged from both observation types, particularly based on aggregate measures. Experiments with ants and humans commonly indicated how significantly the efficiency of motion and the rate of discharge depend on the architectural design of the movement environment.Practical applicationsOur findings contribute to the accumulation of evidence needed to identify the boarders of applicability of experimentation with crowds of non-human entities as models of human collective motion as well as the level of measurements (i.e. macroscopic or microscopic) and the type of contexts at which reliable inferences can be drawn. This particularly has implications in the context of experimenting evacuation behaviour for which recruiting human subjects may face ethical restrictions. The findings, at minimum, offer promise as to the potential benefit of piloting such experiments with non-human crowds, thereby forming better-informed hypotheses.

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Insights Toward Characteristics of Merging Streams of Pedestrian Crowds Based on Experiments with Panicked Ants

Cited by 26 publications

References 44 publications

Pedestrian crowd tactical‐level decision making during emergency evacuations

Pedestrian crowd tactical‐level decision making during emergency evacuations

A State-of-the-Art Review on Empirical Data Collection for External Governed Pedestrians Complex Movement

Collective movements of pedestrians: How we can learn from simple experiments with non-human (ant) crowds

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