The influence of physical and mental constraints to a stream of people through a bottleneck

TL;DR

This study investigates how physical and mental constraints affect crowd movement through bottlenecks, revealing that heterogeneity significantly influences safety-related performance metrics.

Contribution

It provides experimental data on heterogeneous crowd movement, highlighting the impact of disabilities and individual behaviors on evacuation dynamics.

Findings

Heterogeneity affects key performance metrics like density and velocity.

Complex behaviors influence crowd flow and safety.

New insights into individual density-velocity relationships are presented.

Abstract

Understanding movement in heterogeneous groups is important for a meaningful evaluation of evacuation prediction and for a proper design of buildings. The understanding of interactions and influencing factors in heterogeneous groups on key performance figures is fundamental for a safe design. This contribution presents results of experimental studies on movement of a crowd through a bottleneck involving participants with and without disabilities. High precise trajectories of the attendees extracted from video recordings were used to calculate density and velocity of the participants. Besides the well-established fundamental diagram new insights into the individual relation between density and velocity are discussed. A complex structure and considerate behaviour in movement implicates a strong influence of the heterogeneity on key performance values of safe movement.