Fluid-Based Analysis of Pedestrian Crowd at Bottlenecks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fluid-based model integrating psychological principles and Newtonian motion to analyze pedestrian crowd behavior at bottlenecks, enhancing understanding of safety and efficiency during emergency egress.

Contribution

It develops a novel fluid-based equation that bridges psychological insights, pedestrian modeling, and simulation to explain crowd dynamics and safety phenomena.

Findings

Provides a new perspective on the faster-is-slower effect.

Explains how energy balance affects crowd flow and safety.

Offers insights into causes of jamming and stampedes at bottlenecks.

Abstract

In emergency egress crowd behavior critically affects egress efficiency and public safety. By integrating psychological principles to Newtonian motion of crowd, a fluid-based equation is derived in this paper to explore how energy in different forms is balanced when pedestrian crowd pass through a bottleneck. Such fluid-based analysis helps to bridge a gap among psychological findings, pedestrian models and simulation results, and it further provides a new perspective to understand how the faster-is-slower effect is caused and how disastrous events (e.g., jamming and stampede) occur at a bottleneck passage.