Social groups exhibit some degree of social cohesion that is more than a simple collection or aggregation of individuals. The study on behaviours of social groups is essential to gain a deeper understanding on pedestrian dynamics. In this paper, the crowd movement among individuals and social groups are studied by performing a series of multidirectional pedestrian flow experiments under laboratory condition. Interestingly, we found that the speed of individual is not always higher than that of social groups. Pedestrians try to use different strategies to arrive their destination. With different strategies, their speed and movement time show different properties. These findings may provide basis for facility design and evacuation plan.

Exit is the bottleneck of an evacuation from a room and the flow rate through an exit is believed to be depended on its width. A series of experiments were conducted in a bi-dimensional container where mice were driven to pass through two kinds of exit of the identical width, i.e., a conventional exit and a hopper-shape exit. The evacuation efficiency of the two exits was experimentally compared by using mice under competition. The results showed that a hopper-shape exit reduces the escape time by 25% compared with a conventional exit. Further study was conducted with the presence of a column in front of the two exits. The presence of a column in front of the conventional exit increases the escape time by 22.5%. On the contrary, the placement of column in front of the hopper-shape exit reduces the escape time by 48%. The study showed that the escape efficiency could be greatly improved by appropriately redesigning configuration of exit.

In this paper, we developed a new pedestrian model, where pedestrians are represented with three circles and rotate their body to avoid others. In most pedestrian models, the body posture of pedestrians is statically connected with the walking direction; however, they may become different in our model, in other words, pedestrians can walk sideways. We conducted simulation on bidirectional flow in a narrow corridor where body rotation is necessary to avoid collisions and succeeded to reproduce realistic fundamental diagram.

The study of pedestrian flow characteristics at upstream and downstream of bottlenecks is important from level of service and evacuation perspective. Many controlled laboratory experiments have been conducted to study pedestrians’ behavior at bottlenecks. However, it is unclear whether experiments can reproduce real crowd flow characteristics. In this paper, real field data was collected at normal conditions for unidirectional pedestrian movement at Mahakaleshwar, a Hindu temple at Ujjain, India during Mahashivaratri, a festival day on which a large number of pilgrims visited the temple. Along the corridor there is a width reduction at a U-turn which creates a bottleneck. It is necessary to study pedestrian flow characteristics at bottlenecks to ensure desired level of service at temple premises during heavy flow. The speed-density relationships of upstream and downstream sections were compared and it was found that flow behavior at both the sections of bottleneck severely differ from each other. Pedestrians in the upstream are either at free flow speed for very low density values or moving slowly for intermediate to high range of density values. From the speed-density relationship, it can be concluded that pedestrians at upstream had visual clues of congestion ahead at bottleneck (pedestrian could also see the downstream flow through barricades). Therefore, pedestrians wait at their position, stay in their comfort zone and do not push each other. Thus, even at intermediate local density, pedestrians have such low speeds. This violates the general assumption that pedestrians change their speed only at the shockwave boundary. The movement of pedestrians at upstream is governed by local density and information of congestion status ahead, whereas pedestrian movement at downstream is governed by factors like density, side friction and pedestrians’ willingness to compensate for the delay at bottleneck. This study is expected to have application in planning and operation of pedestrian facilities.

Pedestrian dynamics is an interdisciplinary field of research. Psychologists, sociologists, traffic engineers, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists all strive to understand the dynamics of a moving crowd. In principle, computer simulations offer means to further this understanding. Yet, unlike for many classic dynamical systems in physics, there is no universally accepted locomotion model for crowd dynamics. On the contrary, a multitude of approaches, with very different characteristics, compete. Often only the experts in one special model type are able to assess the consequences these characteristics have on a simulation study. Therefore, scientists from all disciplines who wish to use simulations to analyze pedestrian dynamics need a tool to compare competing approaches. Developers, too, would profit from an easy way to get insight into an alternative modeling ansatz. Vadere meets this interdisciplinary demand by offering an open-source simulation framework that is lightweight in its approach and in its user interface while offering pre-implemented versions of the most widely spread models.

Pedestrian dynamics is concerned with understanding the movement patterns that arise in places where more than one person walks. Relating theoretical models to data is a crucial goal of research in this field. Statistical model fitting and model selection are a suitable approach to this problem and here we review the concepts and literature related to this methodology in the context of pedestrian dynamics. The central tenet of statistical modelling is to describe the relationship between different variables by using probability distributions. Rather than providing a critique of existing methodology or a "how to" guide for such an established research technique, our review aims to highlight broad concepts, different uses, best practices, challenges and opportunities with a focussed view on theoretical models for pedestrian behaviour. This contribution is aimed at researchers in pedestrian dynamics who want to carefully analyse data, relate a theoretical model to data, or compare the relative quality of several theoretical models. The survey of the literature we present provides many methodological starting points and we suggest that the particular challenges to statistical modelling in pedestrian dynamics make this an inherently interesting field of research.