Description: Measuring the steady state of pedestrian flow in bottleneck experiments

This title appears in the Scientific Report : 2016

Measuring the steady state of pedestrian flow in bottleneck experiments

Experiments with pedestrians could depend strongly on initial conditions. Comparisons of the results of such experiments require to distinguish carefully between transient state and steady state. Thus a modified version of the Cumulative Sum Control Chart algorithm is proposed to robustly detect ste...

Personal Name(s):	Liao, Weichen (Corresponding author)
	Tordeux, Antoine / Seyfried, Armin / Chraibi, Mohcine / Drzycimski, Kevin / Zheng, Xiaoping / Zhao, Ying
Contributing Institute:	Jülich Supercomputing Center; JSC
Published in:	Physica / A, 461 (2016) S. 248 - 261
Imprint:	Amsterdam North Holland Publ. Co. 2016
DOI:	10.1016/j.physa.2016.05.051
Document Type:	Journal Article
Research Program:	Computational Science and Mathematical Methods
	Publikationsportal JuSER

Please use the identifier: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2016.05.051 in citations.

Experiments with pedestrians could depend strongly on initial conditions. Comparisons of the results of such experiments require to distinguish carefully between transient state and steady state. Thus a modified version of the Cumulative Sum Control Chart algorithm is proposed to robustly detect steady states from density and speed time series of bottleneck experiments. The threshold of the detection parameter in the algorithm is calibrated using an autoregressive model. Comparing the detected steady states with manually selected ones, the modified algorithm gives robust and reproducible results. For the applications, three groups of bottleneck experiments are analysed and the steady states are detected. The results reconfirm that the specific flow is constant as bottleneck width changes. Moreover, we proposed a criterion to judge the difference between the flows in all states and in steady states, which is the ratio of pedestrian number to bottleneck width. The critical value of the ratio is found to be approximately 115 persons/m. This conclusion applies not only for the analysis of existing bottleneck experiments but also for the design of new bottleneck experiments and the validation of evacuation models. Furthermore, the range of steady state in time series of pedestrian characteristics could be effectively controlled by adjusting the value of the ratio.