Micro- and Macroscopic Modeling of Crowding and Pushing in Corridors

TL;DR

This paper develops and validates micro- and macroscopic mathematical models to study how corridor geometry and pedestrian motivation influence crowd dynamics, supported by experimental calibration and numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces and compares new models at both levels, integrating experimental data to analyze crowd behavior under different geometric and motivational conditions.

Findings

Models reproduce qualitative features of pedestrian flow

Geometry and motivation significantly affect pedestrian density

Numerical simulations align with experimental observations

Abstract

Experiments with pedestrians revealed that the geometry of the domain, as well as the incentive of pedestrians to reach a target as fast as possible have a strong influence on the overall dynamics. In this paper, we propose and validate different mathematical models at the micro- and macroscopic levels to study the influence of both effects. We calibrate the models with experimental data and compare the results at the micro -- as well as macroscopic levels. Our numerical simulations reproduce qualitative experimental features on both levels, and indicate how geometry and motivation level influence the observed pedestrian density. Furthermore, we discuss the dynamics of solutions for different modeling approaches and comment on the analysis of the respective equations.