The fundamental diagram of pedestrian movement revisited

By Armin Seyfried, Bernhard Steffen, Wolfram Klingsch, Maik Boltes. 2005

621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The empirical relation between density and velocity of pedestrian movement has not been completely analysed, particularly with regard to the ‘microscopic’ causes which determine the relation at medium and high densities. The simplest system for the investigation of this dependence is the normal movement of pedestrians along a line (single-file movement). This paper presents experimental results for this system under laboratory conditions and discusses the following observations: the data show a linear relation between the velocity and the inverse of the density, which can be regarded as the required length for one pedestrian to move. Furthermore, we compare the results for the single-file movement with literature data for the movement in a plane. This comparison shows an unexpected conformance between the fundamental diagrams, indicating that lateral interference has negligible influence on the velocity–density relation in the density domain 1 m−2 > ρ > 5 m−2. In addition, we test a procedure for automatic recording of pedestrian flow characteristics. We present preliminary results on the measurement range and accuracy of this method.

Subfields: Building and Construction, Civil and Structural Engineering, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aac018e529d9c4a254c4dcd4408ba4b61f626ce2

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In Building and Construction

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Citations in the corpus

From Crowd Dynamics to Crowd Safety: a Video-Based Analysis (2008, background): “Video-based studies of pedestrian flows have recently been carried out by other authors as well [20, 26, 37].”
Comparison of Pedestrian Fundamental Diagram across Cultures (2009, methodology): “For the movement of pedestrians along a line a linear relation between speed and the inverse of the density was measured in [16].”
On the Modeling of Traffic and Crowds: A Survey of Models, Speculations, and Perspectives (2011, background): “[190] deals with pedestrians treated as particles subject to long-range forces induced by the social behavior of the individuals.”
The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics (2010, result): “This is in agreement with previous empirical and theoretical studies of pedestrian traffic [20,21,22].”
Evacuation Dynamics: Empirical Results, Modeling and Applications (2008, background): “For the movement of pedestrians along a line a linear relation between speed and the inverse of the density was measured in [176].”