Pedestrian flows through a narrow doorway: Effect of individual behaviours on the global flow and microscopic dynamics

A. NICOLAS; S. BOUZAT; M. N. KUPERMAN

TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART B-METHODOLOGICAL

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2017 vol. 99 p. 30 - 43

0191-2615

We study the dynamics of pedestrian flows through a narrow doorway by means of con- trolled experiments. The influence of the pedestrians? behaviours is investigated by pre- scribing a selfish attitude to a fraction c s of the participants, while the others behave po- litely. Thanks to an original setup enabling the re-injection of egressed participants into the room, the analysis is conducted in a (macroscopically) quasi-stationary regime. We find that, as c s is increased, the flow rate J rises, interpolating between published val- ues for egresses in normal conditions and measurements for competitive evacuations. The dependence of several flow properties on the pedestrian density ρat the door, indepen- dently of c s , suggests that macroscopically the behavioural aspects could be subsumed un- der the density, at least in our specific settings with limited crowd pressure. In particular, under these conditions, J grows monotonically with ρup to ?close-packing?( ρ≈9 m −2 ). The flow is then characterised microscopically. Among other quantities, the time lapses between successive escapes, the pedestrians? waiting times in front of the door, and their angles of incidence are analysed statistically. In a nutshell, our main results show that the flow is orderly for polite crowds, with narrowly distributed time lapses between egresses, while for larger c s the flow gets disorderly and vanishing time lapses emerge. For all c s , we find an alternation between short and long time lapses, which we ascribe to a generalised zipper effect. The average waiting time in the exit zone increases with its occupancy. The disorder in the flow and the pressure felt by participants are also assessed.