Measuring the steady state of pedestrian flow in bottleneck experiments

Weichen Liao, Antoine Tordeux, Armin Seyfried, Mohcine Chraibi, Kevin Drzycimski, Xiaoping Zheng and Ying Zhao

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 461, issue C, 248-261

Abstract: Experiments with pedestrians could depend strongly on initial conditions. Comparisons of the results of such experiments require to distinguish carefully between transient state and steady state. Thus a modified version of the Cumulative Sum Control Chart algorithm is proposed to robustly detect steady states from density and speed time series of bottleneck experiments. The threshold of the detection parameter in the algorithm is calibrated using an autoregressive model. Comparing the detected steady states with manually selected ones, the modified algorithm gives robust and reproducible results. For the applications, three groups of bottleneck experiments are analysed and the steady states are detected. The results reconfirm that the specific flow is constant as bottleneck width changes. Moreover, we proposed a criterion to judge the difference between the flows in all states and in steady states, which is the ratio of pedestrian number to bottleneck width. The critical value of the ratio is found to be approximately 115 persons/m. This conclusion applies not only for the analysis of existing bottleneck experiments but also for the design of new bottleneck experiments and the validation of evacuation models. Furthermore, the range of steady state in time series of pedestrian characteristics could be effectively controlled by adjusting the value of the ratio.

Keywords: Bottleneck; Pedestrian experiment; Flow; Steady state; CUSUM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437116302436
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:461:y:2016:i:c:p:248-261

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2016.05.051

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().