Characterizing correlations of flow oscillations at bottlenecks

"Oscillations" occur in quite different kinds of many-particle-systems when two groups of particles with different directions of motion meet or intersect at a certain spot. We present a model of pedestrian motion that is able to reproduce oscillations with different characteristics. The Wald-Wolfowitz test and Gillis' correlated random walk are shown to hold observables that can be used to characterize different kinds of oscillations

Experimental study of pedestrian flow through a bottleneck

In this work the results of a bottleneck experiment with pedestrians are presented in the form of total times, fluxes, specific fluxes, and time gaps. A main aim was to find the dependence of these values from the bottleneck width. The results show a linear decline of the specific flux with increasing width as long as only one person at a time can pass, and a constant value for larger bottleneck widths. Differences between small (one person at a time) and wide bottlenecks (two persons at a time) were also found in the distribution of time gaps.Comment: accepted for publication in J. Stat. Mec

Moore and more and symmetry

In any spatially discrete model of pedestrian motion which uses a regular lattice as basis, there is the question of how the symmetry between the different directions of motion can be restored as far as possible but with limited computational effort. This question is equivalent to the question ''How important is the orientation of the axis of discretization for the result of the simulation?'' An optimization in terms of symmetry can be combined with the implementation of higher and heterogeniously distributed walking speeds by representing different walking speeds via different amounts of cells an agent may move during one round. Therefore all different possible neighborhoods for speeds up to v = 10 (cells per round) will be examined for the amount of deviation from radial symmetry. Simple criteria will be stated which will allow find an optimal neighborhood for each speed. It will be shown that following these criteria even the best mixture of steps in Moore and von Neumann neighborhoods is unable to reproduce the optimal neighborhood for a speed as low as 4.Comment: Proceedings contribution in N. Waldau et al. (editors) "Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics 2005" (2006) pages 297-308. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN: 978-3-540-47062-

The MATSim Network Flow Model for Traffic Simulation Adapted to Large-Scale Emergency Egress and an Application to the Evacuation of the Indonesian City of Padang in Case of a Tsunami Warning

The evacuation of whole cities or even regions is an important problem, as demonstrated by recent events such as evacuation of Houston in the case of Hurricane Rita or the evacuation of coastal cities in the case of Tsunamis. This paper describes a complex evacuation simulation framework for the city of Pandang, with approximately 1,000,000 inhabitants. Padang faces a high risk of being inundated by a tsunami wave. The evacuation simulation is based on the MATSim framework for large-scale transport simulations. Different optimization parameters like evacuation distance, evacuation time, or the variation of the advance warning time are investigated. The results are given as overall evacuation times, evacuation curves, an detailed GIS analysis of the evacuation directions. All these results are discussed with regard to their usability for evacuation recommendations.BMBF, 03G0666E, Verbundprojekt FW: Last-mile Evacuation; Vorhaben: Evakuierungsanalyse und Verkehrsoptimierung, Evakuierungsplan einer Stadt - Sonderprogramm GEOTECHNOLOGIENBMBF, 03NAPAI4, Transport und Verkehr: Verbundprojekt ADVEST: Adaptive Verkehrssteuerung; Teilprojekt Verkehrsplanung und Verkehrssteuerung in Megacitie

The shortest time and/or the shortest path strategies in a CA FF pedestrian dynamics model

This paper deals with a mathematical model of a pedestrian movement. A stochastic cellular automata (CA) approach is used here. The Floor Field (FF) model is a basis model. FF models imply that virtual people follow the shortest path strategy. But people are followed by a strategy of the shortest time as well. This paper is focused on how to mathematically formalize and implement to a model these features of the pedestrian movement. Some results of a simulation are presented.Comment: 4 figures, 4 pages; the paper was submitted to the Crowds and pedestrian behavior workshop (CROWD) for 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, University of Milano Bicocca, Mila