A counterintuitive way to speed up pedestrian and granular bottleneck flows prone to clogging: Can 'more' escape faster?

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that adding contact-averse entities, like polite pedestrians or magnetic disks, can reduce clogging and speed up flow through narrow constrictions in granular and pedestrian systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel strategy of including contact-averse agents to mitigate clogging in bottleneck flows, supported by simulations and experiments.

Findings

Polite pedestrians do not reduce evacuation time in large doorways.

Adding magnetic disks speeds up flow in narrow hopper openings.

Contact-averse agents shorten time intervals between successive exits.

Abstract

Dense granular flows through constrictions, as well as competitive pedestrian evacuations, are hindered by a propensity to form clogs. We usesimulations of model pedestrians and experiments with granular disks to explore an original strategy to speed up these flows, which consists in including contact-averse entities in the assembly. On the basis of a minimal cellular automaton and a continuous agent-based model for pedestrian evacuation dynamics, we find that the inclusion of polite pedestrians amid a given competitive crowd fails to reduce the evacuation time when the constriction (the doorway) is acceptably large. This is not surprising, because adding agents makes the crowd larger. In contrast, when the door is so narrow that it can accommodate at most one or two agents at a time, our strategy succeeds in substantially curbing long-lived clogs and speeding up the evacuation. A similar effect is seen experimentally in a vibrated two-dimensional hopper flow with an opening narrower than 3 disk diameters. Indeed, by adding to the initial collection of neutral disks a large fraction of magnetic ones, interacting repulsively, we observe a shortening of the time intervals between successive egresses of neutral disks, as reflected by the study of their probability distribution. On a more qualitative note, our study suggests that the much discussed analogy between pedestrian flows and granular flows could be extended to some behavioural traits of individual pedestrians.