An aging population is bringing new challenges to the management of escape routes and facility design in many countries. This paper investigates pedestrian movement properties of crowd with different age compositions. Three pedestrian groups are considered: young student group, old people group, and mixed group. It is found that traffic jams occur more frequently in mixed group due to the great differences of mobilities and self-adaptive abilities among pedestrians. The jams propagate backward with a velocity 0.4m/s for global density ρ_{g}≈1.75m^{-1} and 0.3m/s for ρ_{g}>2.3m^{-1}. The fundamental diagrams of the three groups are obviously different from each other and cannot be unified into one diagram by direct nondimensionalization. Unlike previous studies, three linear regimes in mixed group but only two regimes in young student group are observed in the headway-velocity relation, which is also verified in the fundamental diagram. Different ages and mobilities of pedestrians in a crowd cause the heterogeneity of system and influence the properties of pedestrian dynamics significantly. It indicates that the density is not the only factor leading to jams in pedestrian traffic. The composition of crowd has to be considered in understanding pedestrian dynamics and facility design.

An aging population is bringing new challenges to the management of escape routes and facility design in many countries. In this paper the movement properties of middle-and old-aged adults are studied with series of single-file movement experiments under laboratory conditions. The fundamental diagrams for two different groups of pedestrians and time-space diagrams are compared. For the groups with different composition and status, the fundamental diagrams are totally different but maintain the same trend. Active crowd leads to inhomogeneous pedestrian flow but higher flow rate, while inactive pedestrians prefer to keep pace with others or keep larger personal space, which leads to more jams and stop-and-go waves. Density and inhomogeneous of speed do not always play main roles on the appearance of stop-and-go.

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