Effect Of Obstacle On Crowd Dynamics In Corridors: An Experimental And Simulation Research

Obstacles in the direction of pedestrian movement inside the built facilities affect the normal pedestrian flow,and may cause serious casualties under conditions such as sudden fires.Therefore,studying the influence of obstacle on pedestrian dynamics is of great importance to strengthen crowd organization and management,improve the optimization of the layout of facilities and equipment in large public places,and prevent the occurrence of major casualties such as trampling.Reviewing literatures on the topic of the effect of obstacle on evacuation,it can be found that the existing researches mainly focuses on analyzing the effect of obstacle on pedestrian evacuation efficiency,the pedestrian movement characteristics of avoiding obstacle have been paid less attention,especially from the view point of empirical analysis.In response to this problem,we change the shape and size of obstacles,and design well-structured pedestrian experiments,perform computer simulations to systematically investigate the effects of obstacle on pedestrian movement characteristics in long corridor.The detailed researches is summarized as follows,First of all,individual and crowd pedestrian motion experiments has been designed and performed to explore the effect of obstacles with different shapes and sizes on pedestrian’s locomotion features including trajectory,speed,target drift angle,and avoidance distance.It can be found from the experimental results that when individual pedestrian and crowd try to avoid obstacle,their trajectories will form a triangular avoidance area in front of the obstacle,and the size of this area is closely related to the shape and size of the obstacle.At the same time,for individual pedestrian,the number of right-turning pedestrian and the target drift angle show obvious changes with the increase of obstacle size,while the speed only changes significantly when the obstacle size is greater than 1.5m.For the crowd,the changing rate of movement time,target drift angle,and speed curve all increase with the increase of obstacle size.Secondly,based on the quantitative laws obtained from the experimental analysis,pedestrian expected speed changing rules have been proposed,and the idea of potential field has been introduced to calculate the direction of pedestrian expected speed,so as to improve the shortcomings of the obstacle avoidance mechanism in the original social force model.In the pedestrian simulation model we established,pedestrian can actively avoid obstacle during as a result of the obstacle bypass mechanism.Finally,through comparative analysis of simulation and experimental results,the proposed model was verified and validated.