The calibration and validation of pedestrian simulations require the acquisition of empirical evidences of human behaviour. The current work presents the results of an experiment focused on the potentially combined effect of counter flow and grouping on pedestrian dynamics. In particular, we focused on: (i) four different configurations of flow ratio (the rate between the minor flow and the total flow in bidirectional scenarios); (ii) dyads, as the most frequently observed and basic social groups of crowds. Results showed that the increase of flow ratio negatively impacted the speed of pedestrians. Dyads walked significantly slower than singletons, due to the difficulty in movement coordination among group members (proxemics) in case of counter flow. The collected results represent an useful contribution towards the validation of pedestrian simulations.
@article{arxiv.1610.08325,
title = {Social Groups and Pedestrian Crowds: Experiment on Dyads in a Counter Flow Scenario},
author = {Andrea Gorrini and Luca Crociani and Claudio Feliciani and Pengfei Zhao and Katsuhiro Nishinari and Stefania Bandini},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.08325},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
Pre-print of a paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED2016), Hefei, China - Oct 17-21, 2016