Constant net-time headway as key mechanism behind pedestrian flow dynamics

Abstract

We show that keeping a constant lower limit on the net-time headway is the key mechanism behind the dynamics of pedestrian streams. There is a large variety in flow and speed as functions of density for empirical data of pedestrian streams, obtained from studies in different countries. The net-time headway however, stays approximately constant over all these different data sets. By using this fact, we demonstrate how the underlying dynamics of pedestrian crowds, naturally follows from local interactions. This means that there is no need to come up with an arbitrary fit function (with arbitrary fit parameters) as has traditionally been done. Further, by using not only the average density values, but the variance as well, we show how the recently reported stop-and-go waves [Helbing et al., Physical Review E, 75, 046109] emerge when local density variations take values exceeding a certain maximum global (average) density, which makes pedestrians stop.

7 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (6)

• The Dynamics of Crowd Disasters: An Empirical Study
• Delays, Inaccuracies and Anticipation in Microscopic Traffic Models
• Experimental study of pedestrian flow through a bottleneck
• Modeling Crowd Turbulence by Many-Particle Simulations
• Microscopic Pedestrian Flow Characteristics: Development of an Image Processing Data Collection and Simulation Model
• Analytical Approach to Continuous and Intermittent Bottleneck Flows

Cited by in corpus (13)

• How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters
• Human Mobility: Models and Applications
• Transitions in pedestrian fundamental diagrams of straight corridors and T-junctions
• Universal power law governing pedestrian interactions
• Properties of pedestrians walking in line - Fundamental diagrams
• Properties of pedestrians walking in line: Stepping behavior
• Analytical Modelling of the Spread of Disease in Confined and Crowded Spaces
• Evacuation time estimate for a total pedestrian evacuation using queuing network model and volunteered geographic information
• Time-delayed Follow-the-Leader model for pedestrians walking in line
• Experimental studies of pedestrian flows under different boundary conditions
• Effects of Crowding Perception on Self-organized Pedestrian Flows Using Adaptive Agent-based Model
• A re-examination of the role of friction in the original Social Force Model
• Quantification of bottleneck effects for different types of facilities