Membranes for spontaneous separation of pedestrian counterflows

Abstract

Designing efficient traffic lanes for pedestrians is a critical aspect of urban planning as walking remains the most common form of mobility among the increasingly diverse methods of transportation. Herein, we investigate pedestrian counter flows in a straight corridor, in which two groups of people are walking in opposite directions. We demonstrate, using a molecular dynamics approach applying the social force model, that a simple array of obstacles improves flow rates by producing flow separations even in crowded situations. We also report on a developed model describing the separation behavior that regards an array of obstacles as a membrane and induces spontaneous separation of pedestrians groups. When appropriately designed, those obstacles are fully capable of controlling the filtering direction so that pedestrians tend to keep moving to their left (or right) spontaneously. These results have the potential to provide useful guidelines for industrial designs aimed at improving ubiquitous human mobility.

Understanding contagion dynamics through microscopic processes in active Brownian particles

“…Although our study focuses mainly on particle density and contagious rates, we expect that our model can be improved by including complex interactions such as quorum-sensing to describe viruses propagation in birds or schools of fish or by adding external forces to describe human will 3 , 30 , 31 . Nevertheless, how these new interactions alter and couple the dynamics with compartmental models are exciting new questions that our work opens to the active matter community.…”

“…Although living systems in this length scale are plenty, such as marine and aerial groups of animals, their modeling is less unified since their dynamics depend on the fluid media where they move and because particle interactions get more specific in function on the target problem 18 , 29 . For instance, human mobility has been modeled using self-propelled models with a gravitational term that describes the ambient information 30 , 31 . Other approaches to the dynamics of infectious diseases in humans 32 have also been explored using a non-linear wave approach by means of reaction–diffusion equations to model the effect of random motion in the SIR dynamics.…”

“…www.nature.com/scientificreports/ modeled using self-propelled models with a gravitational term that describes the ambient information 30,31 . Other approaches to the dynamics of infectious diseases in humans 32 have also been explored using a non-linear wave approach by means of reaction-diffusion equations to model the effect of random motion in the SIR dynamics.…”

Social distancing slows down steady dynamics in pedestrian flows

“…This work builds upon a significant body of work in recent years that has studied the effect of a variety of factors in the context of pedestrian counter-flows, including obstacle arrays, 4,5 spontaneous lane formation, 6 internal ordering, 7,8 and psychological groupings. 9 A topic of particular interest in pedestrian dynamics studies is the characterization of jamming or clogging phenomena in relatively narrow corridors, 7,10–12 which we study here.…”