Pedestrian Traffic Characterization Based on Pedestrian Response

Abstract

Pedestrian behavior is studied during normal and emergency evacuation of two groups of students. One group consists of grade nine high school students while the other group includes diploma (college) students. The evacuation time, number of steps, step frequency, and velocity are observed. It is found that the number of steps, step frequency, and velocity are larger during an emergency evacuation. These results are used to develop a macroscopic pedestrian response model. This model is compared with the Lighthill, Whitham, and Richards (LWR) model for pedestrian traffic using the First Order Centered (FORCE) scheme. Pedestrian parameters from the experiments are used for model evaluation. The direction of pedestrian movement is changed multiple times to observe pedestrian alignment behavior. It has been found that the proposed model performs more realistically than the LWR model.