Empirical study on social groups in pedestrian evacuation dynamics

Cornelia von Krüchten and Andreas Schadschneider

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2017, vol. 475, issue C, 129-141

Abstract: Pedestrian crowds often include social groups, i.e. pedestrians that walk together because of social relationships. They show characteristic configurations and influence the dynamics of the entire crowd. In order to investigate the impact of social groups on evacuations we performed an empirical study with pupils. Several evacuation runs with groups of different sizes and different interactions were performed. New group parameters are introduced which allow to describe the dynamics of the groups and the configuration of the group members quantitatively. The analysis shows a possible decrease of evacuation times for large groups due to self-ordering effects. Social groups can be approximated as ellipses that orientate along their direction of motion. Furthermore, explicitly cooperative behaviour among group members leads to a stronger aggregation of group members and an intermittent way of evacuation.

Keywords: Pedestrian dynamics; Social groups; Empirical study; Evacuation scenarios (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:475:y:2017:i:c:p:129-141

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2017.02.004

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