The discrete dynamics of small-scale spatial events: agent-based models of mobility in carnivals and street parades

Small-scale spatial events are situations in which elements or objects vary in such away that temporal dynamics is intrinsic to their representation and explanation. Someof the clearest examples involve local movement from conventional traffic modelingto disaster evacuation where congestion, crowding, panic, and related safety issue arekey features of such events. We propose that such events can be simulated using newvariants of pedestrian model, which embody ideas about how behavior emerges fromthe accumulated interactions between small-scale objects. We present a model inwhich the event space is first explored by agents using ?swarm intelligence?. Armedwith information about the space, agents then move in an unobstructed fashion to theevent. Congestion and problems over safety are then resolved through introducingcontrols in an iterative fashion and rerunning the model until a ?safe solution? isreached. The model has been developed to simulate the effect of changing the route ofthe Notting Hill Carnival, an annual event held in west central London over 2 days inAugust each year. One of the key issues in using such simulation is how the processof modeling interacts with those who manage and control the event. As such, thischanges the nature of the modeling problem from one where control and optimizationis external to the model to one where this is intrinsic to the simulation

Evacuation in the Social Force Model is not stationary

An evacuation process is simulated within the Social Force Model. Thousand pedestrians are leaving a room by one exit. We investigate the stationarity of the distribution of time lags between instants when two successive pedestrians cross the exit. The exponential tail of the distribution is shown to gradually vanish. Taking fluctuations apart, the time lags decrease in time till there are only about 50 pedestrians in the room, then they start to increase. This suggests that at the last stage the flow is laminar. In the first stage, clogging events slow the evacuation down. As they are more likely for larger crowds, the flow is not stationary. The data are investigated with detrended fluctuation analysis.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; PACS numbers: 89.75.Fb, 05.40.-a, 05.45.Tp, 89.40.B

Crowd Research at School: Crossing Flows

It has become widely known that when two flows of pedestrians cross stripes emerge spontaneously by which the pedestrians of the two walking directions manage to pass each other in an orderly manner. In this work, we report about the results of an experiment on crossing flows which has been carried out at a German school. These results include that previously reported high flow volumes on the crossing area can be confirmed. The empirical results are furthermore compared to the results of a simulation model which succesfully could be calibrated to catch the specific properties of the population of participants.Comment: contribution to proceedings of Traffic and Granular Flow 2013 held in J\"ulich, German

How simple rules determine pedestrian behavior and crowd disasters

With the increasing size and frequency of mass events, the study of crowd disasters and the simulation of pedestrian flows have become important research areas. Yet, even successful modeling approaches such as those inspired by Newtonian force models are still not fully consistent with empirical observations and are sometimes hard to calibrate. Here, a novel cognitive science approach is proposed, which is based on behavioral heuristics. We suggest that, guided by visual information, namely the distance of obstructions in candidate lines of sight, pedestrians apply two simple cognitive procedures to adapt their walking speeds and directions. While simpler than previous approaches, this model predicts individual trajectories and collective patterns of motion in good quantitative agreement with a large variety of empirical and experimental data. This includes the emergence of self-organization phenomena, such as the spontaneous formation of unidirectional lanes or stop-and-go waves. Moreover, the combination of pedestrian heuristics with body collisions generates crowd turbulence at extreme densities-a phenomenon that has been observed during recent crowd disasters. By proposing an integrated treatment of simultaneous interactions between multiple individuals, our approach overcomes limitations of current physics-inspired pair interaction models. Understanding crowd dynamics through cognitive heuristics is therefore not only crucial for a better preparation of safe mass events. It also clears the way for a more realistic modeling of collective social behaviors, in particular of human crowds and biological swarms. Furthermore, our behavioral heuristics may serve to improve the navigation of autonomous robots.Comment: Article accepted for publication in PNA

Pedestrians moving in dark: Balancing measures and playing games on lattices

We present two conceptually new modeling approaches aimed at describing the motion of pedestrians in obscured corridors: * a Becker-D\"{o}ring-type dynamics * a probabilistic cellular automaton model. In both models the group formation is affected by a threshold. The pedestrians are supposed to have very limited knowledge about their current position and their neighborhood; they can form groups up to a certain size and they can leave them. Their main goal is to find the exit of the corridor. Although being of mathematically different character, the discussion of both models shows that it seems to be a disadvantage for the individual to adhere to larger groups. We illustrate this effect numerically by solving both model systems. Finally we list some of our main open questions and conjectures

A Comprehensive Study on Pedestrians' Evacuation

Human beings face threats because of unexpected happenings, which can be avoided through an adequate crisis evacuation plan, which is vital to stop wound and demise as its negative results. Consequently, different typical evacuation pedestrians have been created. Moreover, through applied research, these models for various applications, reproductions, and conditions have been examined to present an operational model. Furthermore, new models have been developed to cooperate with system evacuation in residential places in case of unexpected events. This research has taken into account an inclusive and a 'systematic survey of pedestrian evacuation' to demonstrate models methods by focusing on the applications' features, techniques, implications, and after that gather them under various types, for example, classical models, hybridized models, and generic model. The current analysis assists scholars in this field of study to write their forthcoming papers about it, which can suggest a novel structure to recent typical intelligent reproduction with novel features

Dynamics of pedestrians in regions with no visibility - a lattice model without exclusion

We investigate the motion of pedestrians through obscure corridors where the lack of visibility (due to smoke, fog, darkness, etc.) hides the precise position of the exits. We focus our attention on a set of basic mechanisms, which we assume to be governing the dynamics at the individual level. Using a lattice model, we explore the effects of non-exclusion on the overall exit flux (evacuation rate). More precisely, we study the effect of the buddying threshold (of no-exclusion per site) on the dynamics of the crowd and investigate to which extent our model confirms the following pattern revealed by investigations on real emergencies: If the evacuees tend to cooperate and act altruistically, then their collective action tends to favor the occurrence of disasters.Comment: 20 page