Experimental study of pedestrian flow through a T-junction

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates pedestrian flow through a T-junction, analyzing detailed spatial and density-velocity relationships, revealing flow dynamics and differences between branches and main stream.

Contribution

It provides high-resolution spatial measurements of pedestrian flow in a T-junction and compares fundamental diagrams across different locations, highlighting flow variations.

Findings

Velocities in front of merging are lower than in the main stream at same densities.

Specific flow increases with density up to 2.5 m^-2.

Flow in branches is nearly independent of density between 1.5 and 3.5 m^-2.

Abstract

In this study, series of experiments under laboratory conditions were carried out to investigate pedestrian flow through a T-junction, i.e., two branches merging into the main stream. The whole duration of the experiments was recorded by video cameras and the trajectories of each pedestrian were extracted using the software Petrack from these videos. The Voronoi method is used to resolve the fine structure of the fundamental diagram and spatial dependence of the measured quantities from trajectories. In our study, only the data in the stationary state are used by analyzing the time series of density and velocity. The density, velocity and specific flow profiles are obtained by refining the size of the measurement area (here 10 cm \times 10 cm are adopted). With such a high resolution, the spatial distribution of density, velocity and specific flow can be obtained separately and the regions with higher value can be observed intuitively. Finally, the fundamental diagrams of T-junction flow is compared in three different locations. It is shown that the fundamental diagrams of the two branches match well. However, the velocities in front of the merging are significantly lower than that in the main stream at the same densities. After the merging, the specific flow increases with the density \rho till 2.5 m-2. While in the branches, the specific flow is almost independent of the density between \rho = 1.5 m-2 and 3.5 m-2