Experimental Analysis of Two-Dimensional Pedestrian Flow in front of the Bottleneck

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates two-dimensional pedestrian flow in front of a bottleneck, analyzing behavior, density, and velocity to understand phase transitions and crowd dynamics.

Contribution

It provides new experimental data on pedestrian behavior near bottlenecks, including phase transition analysis and comparison of measurement approaches.

Findings

Identified two distinct crowd phases

Described phase transition in pedestrian flow

Compared measurement methods for density and velocity

Abstract

This contribution presents experimental study of two-dimensional pedestrian flow with the aim to capture the pedestrian behaviour within the cluster formed in front of the bottleneck. Two experiments of passing through a room with one entrance and one exit were arranged according to phase transition study in Ezaki et al. (2012), the inflow rate was regulated to obtain different walking modes. By means of automatic image processing, pedestrians' paths are extracted from camera records to get actual velocity and local density. Macroscopic information is extracted by means of virtual detector and leaving times of pedestrians. The pedestrian's behaviour is evaluated by means of density and velocity. Different approaches of measurement are compared using several fundamental diagrams. Two phases of crowd behaviour have been recognized and the phase transition was described.