Effects of Corridor Shapes on Unidirectional Crowd Dynamics

Different traffic efficiencies of unidirectional pedestrian flows caused by the shapes of corridors evoked much scientific interest in studying unidirectional crowd dynamics. Based on the microscopic continuum method i.e. the improved social force model considering the excitation, the characteristics of unidirectional pedestrian flow through different shapes of corridors which all have the same physical areas are analyzed. In particular, the snapshots of the motion states e.g. “zipper” effect in the bottleneck of corridor and the corresponding trajectories of the unidirectional crowd are simulated and compared, which indicate that pedestrians' trajectories are indeed related to the shape of corridor. The unidirectional crowd dynamics characterized by three variables, namely the accumulated number of pedestrians leaving the corridor, the mean number of pedestrians in the corridor and the mean speed of the unidirectional crowd, are further focused on. The simulation results reflect that different shapes of corridors proposed in this paper have similar influences on the free walking speed and leaving efficiency. However, under a relatively large inflow, for example, the inflow is 8 p/s, significant effects of different shapes of corridors on the unidirectional crowd dynamics exhibit in the simulation, and jamming occurs more easily.