Cellular automaton simulation of pedestrian counter flow considering the surrounding environment

Study on strategies for alighting and boarding in subway stations

With its high infection rate, COVID-19 has swept the globe and brought great challenges to social life and economies. As an essential form of public transportation, the Beijing subway plays an important role in transportation systems. In traditional subway organizations, all one-sided doors of a train carriage are employed for passengers' alighting and boarding. A higher risk of COVID-19 infections may be attributed to inevitable bidirectional conflicts at doors with higher passenger volumes. Moreover, quantitative analyses for this problem and corresponding solutions are, limited in recent studies. In this research, conflicts at carriage doors are analyzed using a cellular automaton (CA) based model. Four schemes to separate alighting and passenger boarding into separate doors are investigated. The performances of different schemes with various alighting and boarding passenger ratios are simulated with the software package Legion Studio. Both macroscopic and microscopic parameters to characterize passenger conflicts are obtained for analysis. The separation of alighting and boarding passenger flows yields the desired reduction in bidirectional conflicts, which further limits the probability of infectious disease exposure. This is an important reference to improve current practices and provide specific measurements of passenger organization under abnormal situations.

A Survey of Algorithms and Systems for Evacuating People in Confined Spaces

The frequency, destruction and costs of natural and human-made disasters in modern highly-populated societies have resulted in research on emergency evacuation and wayfinding, which has drawn considerable attention. The subject is now a multidisciplinary area of research where information and communication technologies (ICT), and in particular the Internet of Things (IoT), have a significant impact on sensing and computing dynamic reactions that mitigate or prevent the worst outcomes of disasters. This paper offers state-of-the-art knowledge in this area so as to share ongoing research results, identify the research gaps and address the need for future research. We present a comprehensive review of research on emergency evacuation and wayfinding, focusing on the algorithmic and system design aspects. Starting from the history of emergency management research, we identify the emerging challenges concerning system optimisation, evacuee behaviour optimisation and data analysis, and the additional energy consumption by ICT equipment that operates the emergency management infrastructure.

Computer simulation of leadership, consensus decision making and collective behaviour in humans

The aim of this study is to evaluate the reliability of a crowd simulation model developed by the authors by reproducing Dyer et al.'s experiments (published in Philosophical Transactions in 2009) on human leadership and consensus decision making in a computer-based environment. The theoretical crowd model of the simulation environment is presented, and its results are compared and analysed against Dyer et al.'s original experiments. It is concluded that the simulation results are largely consistent with the experiments, which demonstrates the reliability of the crowd model. Furthermore, the simulation data also reveals several additional new findings, namely: 1) the phenomena of sacrificing accuracy to reach a quicker consensus decision found in ants colonies was also discovered in the simulation; 2) the ability of reaching consensus in groups has a direct impact on the time and accuracy of arriving at the target position; 3) the positions of the informed individuals or leaders in the crowd could have significant impact on the overall crowd movement; and 4) the simulation also confirmed Dyer et al.'s anecdotal evidence of the proportion of the leadership in large crowds and its effect on crowd movement. The potential applications of these findings are highlighted in the final discussion of this paper.

Quantitative analysis of pedestrian counterflow in a cellular automaton model

Pedestrian dynamics exhibits various collective phenomena. Here, we study bidirectional pedestrian flow in a floor field cellular automaton model. Under certain conditions, lane formation is observed. Although it has often been studied qualitatively, e.g., as a test for the realism of a model, there are almost no quantitative results, either empirically or theoretically. As basis for a quantitative analysis, we introduce an order parameter which is adopted from the analysis of colloidal suspensions. This allows us to determine a phase diagram for the system where four different states (free flow, disorder, lanes, gridlock) can be distinguished. Although the number of lanes formed is fluctuating, lanes are characterized by a typical density. It is found that the basic floor field model overestimates the tendency towards a gridlock compared to experimental bounds. Therefore, an anticipation mechanism is introduced which reduces the jamming probability.

Potential field cellular automata model for pedestrian flow

This paper proposes a cellular automata model of pedestrian flow that defines a cost potential field, which takes into account the costs of travel time and discomfort, for a pedestrian to move to an empty neighboring cell. The formulation is based on a reconstruction of the density distribution and the underlying physics, including the rule for resolving conflicts, which is comparable to that in the floor field cellular automaton model. However, we assume that each pedestrian is familiar with the surroundings, thereby minimizing his or her instantaneous cost. This, in turn, helps reduce the randomness in selecting a target cell, which improves the existing cellular automata modelings, together with the computational efficiency. In the presence of two pedestrian groups, which are distinguished by their destinations, the cost distribution for each group is magnified due to the strong interaction between the two groups. As a typical phenomenon, the formation of lanes in the counter flow is reproduced.

Pedestrian flow dynamics in a lattice gas model coupled with an evolutionary game

This paper studies unidirectional pedestrian flow by using a lattice gas model with parallel update rules. Game theory is introduced to deal with conflicts that two or three pedestrians want to move into the same site. Pedestrians are either cooperators or defectors. The cooperators are gentle and the defectors are aggressive. Moreover, pedestrians could change their strategy. The fundamental diagram and the cooperator fraction at different system width W have been investigated in detail. It is found that a two-lane system exhibits a first-order phase transition while a multilane system does not. A microscopic mechanism behind the transition has been provided. Mean-field analysis is carried out to calculate the critical density of the transition as well as the probability of games at large value of W. The spatial distribution of pedestrians is investigated, which is found to be dependent (independent) on the initial cooperator fraction when W is small (large). Finally, the influence of the evolutionary game rule has been discussed.

Pedestrian flow in a lattice gas model with parallel update

This paper studies unidirectional pedestrian flow in a channel using the lattice gas model with parallel update rule. The conflict (i.e., several pedestrians intend to move to the same site) is solved by introducing probabilities as in floor field models. The fundamental diagram (FD) is investigated and it is found that when the drift strength D≲0.5, the FD is a concave curve. With the further increase in drift strength, a turning point appears on FD. The empirical findings show that both concave FD and FD with a turning point exist. Thus, the model might be able to reproduce both by tuning drift strength. It is also shown that in the special case D=1, two congested branches exist in the FD. We have carried out mean-field analysis of the FD and the mean-field results are in approximate agreement with simulations when the drift strength D is small. A comparison with random sequential update rule model is also made.

Analysis of pedestrian dynamics in counter flow via an extended lattice gas model

The modeling of human behavior is an important approach to reproduce realistic phenomena for pedestrian flow. In this paper, an extended lattice gas model is proposed to simulate pedestrian counter flow under the open boundary conditions by considering the human subconscious behavior and different maximum velocities. The simulation results show that the presented model can capture some essential features of pedestrian counter flows, such as lane formation, segregation effect, and phase separation at higher densities. In particular, an interesting feature that the faster walkers overtake the slower ones and then form a narrow-sparse walkway near the central partition line is discovered. The phase diagram comparison and analysis show that the subconscious behavior plays a key role in reducing the occurrence of jam cluster. The effects of the symmetrical and asymmetrical injection rate, different partition lines, and different combinations of maximum velocities on pedestrian flow are investigated. An important conclusion is that it is needless to separate faster and slower pedestrians in the same direction by a partition line. Furthermore, the increase of the number of faster walkers does not always benefit the counter flow in all situations. It depends on the magnitude and asymmetry of injection rate. And at larger maximum velocity, the obtained critical transition point corresponding to the maximum flow rate of the fundamental diagram is in good agreement with the empirical results.

Static floor field and exit choice for pedestrian evacuation in rooms with internal obstacles and multiple exits

A modified floor field model is proposed to simulate pedestrian evacuation in rooms with internal obstacles and multiple exits. The modifications lie in developing a method to calculate the static floor field for every lattice site, which is determined by the most feasible distance to an exit, and employing a logit-based discrete choice principle to govern the exit selection. Simulation results show that the evacuation time is sensitive to the exit position and some model parameters. For pedestrians unfamiliar with the exit location, additional doors may not be necessary and can cause a negative effect on evacuation time. It is also found that unfamiliarity with the room's inner configuration and blindly following others will lead to an increase of the evacuation time.

Effect of traffic rule breaking behavior on pedestrian counterflow in a channel with a partition line

In this paper a partition line is used in the counterflow system to present the default (conventional) traffic rule: pedestrians prefer to walk on a certain side on the road during movement, e.g., the right-hand side in China or the left-hand side in Japan. Based on the counterflow model of Takimoto (model A), we introduced two modified models, i.e., model B and C, to study the effects of a partition line in the consideration of people who do not obey the default traffic rule. Model B represents that factor in time scale, while model C in space scale. In model B, there are pedestrians who cross the partition line but choose not to obey the default traffic rule with a probability p(nor), while in model C, if a pedestrian crosses the partition line and goes away from it further than a certain nonobeying-rule threshold distance d(t), he will not obey the traffic rule. It is found that the behavior of traffic rule breaking influences much the counterflow when it is at the choking flow state rather than at the free moving or stopped state. Furthermore, it is shown that the default traffic rule is not always positive to the counterflow in all situations. It depends on the game result of these two opposite sides: to use the channel width as much as possible and to avoid the interference from the other group as far as possible.