Friction effects and clogging in a cellular automaton model for pedestrian dynamics.

By Ansgar Kirchner, K. Nishinari, Andreas Schadschneider. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2002

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the role of conflicts in pedestrian traffic, i.e., situations where two or more people try to enter the same space. Therefore a recently introduced cellular automaton model for pedestrian dynamics is extended by a friction parameter mu. This parameter controls the probability that the movement of all particles involved in a conflict is denied at one time step. It is shown that these conflicts are not an undesirable artifact of the parallel update scheme, but are important for a correct description of the dynamics. The friction parameter mu can be interpreted as a kind of an internal local pressure between the pedestrians which becomes important in regions of high density, occurring, e.g., in panic situations. We present simulations of the evacuation of a large room with one door. It is found that friction has not only quantitative effects, but can also lead to qualitative changes, e.g., of the dependence of the evacuation time on the system parameters. We also observe similarities to the flow of granular materials, e.g., arching effects.

Subfields: Computational Theory and Mathematics, Control and Systems Engineering, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/878e90ddda8688366cc5a69b85c870c39e2b1dca

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Citations in the corpus

Human mobility: Models and applications (2017, methodology): “Variations of this model have been used to analyze escape patterns from a building in low visibility conditions [224, 215], to assess evacuation plans in skyscrapers [228, 229], ships [230] and aircraft [231].”
Evacuation Dynamics: Empirical Results, Modeling and Applications (2008, methodology): “Instead with probability μ ∈ [0, 1], which is called friction parameter, the movement of all involved pedestrians is denied [85] (see Fig.”
Modeling crowd evacuation of a building based on seven methodological approaches (2009, background): “[12] proposed an extended stochastic cellular automata model to simulate friction effects and clogging during the evacuation of a large room with one door; Kirchner et al.”
Generalized centrifugal-force model for pedestrian dynamics. (2010, background): “However, a qualitative description is not sufficient if reliable statements about critical processes, e.g., emergency egress, are required.”