Collective patterns of pedestrians interacting with attractions

Abstract

Walking is a fundamental activity of human life, not only for moving between places but also for interacting with surrounding environments. While walking to destinations, pedestrians may acquaint themselves with attractions such as artworks, shop displays, and public events. If such attractions are tempting enough, pedestrians opt to stop walking in order to join the attractions. In crowded conditions, the existence of attractions may considerably affect the pedestrian flow patterns. One can see that the attracted pedestrians often impede passerby flow near the attractions during peak hour in a shopping center. During shopping holidays such as Black Friday in the United States, shoppers are competing for very attractive products in stores and such behavior might lead to pedestrian incidents. The work presented in this dissertation reproduced those phenomena in numerical simulations by developing mathematical models of attracted pedestrian movements. In the models, the crowd preference and the attractiveness of the attraction were taken into account in order to reflect the characteristics of attractions and pedestrian traffic. Furthermore, this dissertation suggested possible explanations of the predicted phenomena based on the interactions between pedestrians and attractions. The presented models can be applied and extended, for example, to optimize pedestrian flow in shopping centers and museums.

arXiv commentDoctoral dissertation, Aalto University, Finland. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-60-7673-7

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