Citation

Jelić A, Appert-Rolland C, Lemercier S, Pettré J. Phys. Rev. E Stat. Nonlin. Soft Matter Phys. 2012; 86(4 Pt 2): 046111.

Affiliation

Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, CNRS (UMR 8627), University Paris-Sud, Batiment 210, F-91405 Orsay Cedex, France and Istituto Sistemi Complessi (ISC-CNR), Via dei Taurini 19, 00185 Roma, Italy and Dipartimento di Fisica, "Sapienza" Universitá di Roma, P.le Aldo Moro 2, 00185 Roma, Italy.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, American Physical Society, Publisher American Institute of Physics)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

23214656

Abstract

In human crowds, interactions among individuals give rise to a variety of self-organized collective motions that help the group to effectively solve the problem of coordination. However, it is still not known exactly how humans adjust their behavior locally, nor what are the direct consequences on the emergent organization. One of the underlying mechanisms of adjusting individual motions is the stepping dynamics. In this paper, we present first quantitative analysis on the stepping behavior in a one-dimensional pedestrian flow studied under controlled laboratory conditions. We find that the step length is proportional to the velocity of the pedestrian, and is directly related to the space available in front of him, while the variations of the step duration are much smaller. This is in contrast with locomotion studies performed on isolated pedestrians and shows that the local density has a direct influence on the stepping characteristics. Furthermore, we study the phenomena of synchronization-walking in lock step-and show its dependence on flow densities. We show that the synchronization of steps is particularly important at high densities, which has direct impact on the studies of optimizing pedestrians' flow in congested situations. However, small synchronization and antisynchronization effects are found also at very low densities, for which no steric constraints exist between successive pedestrians, showing the natural tendency to synchronize according to perceived visual signals.

Language: en