Prolonged Clogs in Bottleneck Simulations for Pedestrian Dynamics

TL;DR

This paper investigates prolonged clogging in pedestrian bottleneck simulations using a velocity-based model, identifying key factors like boundary parameters and movement models that influence clog formation.

Contribution

Introduces a method to detect prolonged clogs and analyzes their causes, highlighting the impact of boundary and movement model parameters over algorithmic factors.

Findings

Prolonged clogs are mainly influenced by boundary and movement model parameters.

Algorithmic factors like update methods and time step size have little effect.

The study provides insights into conditions leading to clogging in pedestrian flow simulations.

Abstract

This article studies clogging phenomena using a velocity-based model for pedestrian dynamics. First, a method to identify prolonged clogs in simulations was introduced. Then bottleneck simulations were implemented with different initial and boundary conditions. The number of prolonged clogs was analyzed to investigate the decisive factors causing this phenomenon. Moreover, the time lapse between two consecutive agents passing the exit, and the trajectories of agents were analyzed. The influence of three types of factors was studied: parameters of the spatial boundaries, algorithmic factors related to the implementation of the model, and the movement model. Parameters of the spatial boundaries include the width and position of the bottleneck exit. Algorithmic factors are the update methods and the size of the time step. Model parameters cover several parameters describing the level of motivation, the strength and range of impact among agents, and the shape of agents. The results show that the occurrence of prolonged clogs is closely linked to parameters of the spatial boundaries and the movement model but has virtually no correlation with algorithmic factors.