Investigation of Pedestrian Dynamics in Circle Antipode Experiments

TL;DR

This study conducts circle antipode experiments to analyze pedestrian navigation, conflict avoidance, and behavioral patterns, providing a basis for evaluating pedestrian models through a novel framework.

Contribution

It introduces a symmetric circle antipode experimental setup and a comprehensive evaluation framework for pedestrian models, incorporating distribution and time-series analysis.

Findings

Pedestrians prefer the right-hand side during navigation.

Route length follows a log-normal distribution; travel time is normally distributed.

Detours can save travel time despite longer routes.

Abstract

To explore the pedestrian motion navigation and conflict reaction mechanisms in practice, we organized a series of circle antipode experiments. In the experiments, pedestrians are uniformly initialized on the circle and required to leave for their antipodal positions simultaneously. On the one hand, a conflicting area is naturally formulated in the central region due to the converged shortest routes, so the practical conflict avoidance behaviors can be fully explored. On the other hand, the symmetric experimental conditions of pedestrians, e.g., symmetric starting points, symmetric destination points, and symmetric surroundings lay the foundation for further quantitative comparisons among participants. The pedestrian trajectories in the experiments are recognized and rotated, and several aspects, e.g., the trajectory space distribution, route length, travel time, velocity distribution, and time-series, are investigated. It is found that: (1) Pedestrians prefer the right-hand side during the experiments; (2) The route length is as the law of log-normal distribution, the route potential obeys the exponential distribution, and the travel time is normally distributed as well as the speed; (3) Taking the short routes unexpectedly cost pedestrians plenty of travel time, while detour seems to be a time-saving decision. What's more, the series of experiments can be regarded as a basis of the model evaluation benefit from the serious conflicts and the symmetric conditions. The evaluation framework contains four distribution indexes and two time series indexes in space and time dimensions, and they are respectively graded A traditional social force model and a Voronoi diagram based modification are introduced to test the evaluation framework. The evaluation results show that the framework is beneficial to evaluate pedestrian models and even reflects the minor differences between the models.