Development of a Bidirectional Pedestrian Stream Model with an Oblique Intersecting Angle

Abstract

This paper establishes a mathematical model that can represent the conflicting effects of two pedestrian streams that have an oblique intersecting angle in a large crowd. In a previous paper, a controlled experiment in which two streams of pedestrians were asked to walk in designated directions was used to model the bidirectional pedestrian stream of certain intersecting angles. In this paper, the writers revisit that problem and apply the Bayesian inference method to calibrate an improved model with the controlled experiment data. Pedestrian movement data are also collected from a busy crosswalk by using a video observation approach. The two sets of data are used separately to calibrate the proposed model. With the calibrated model, the relationship between speed, density, and flow is studied in both the reference and conflicting streams, and a prediction is made regarding how these factors affected the interactions of moving pedestrian streams. It is found that the speed of one stream not only decreases with its total density, but also decreases with the ratio of its flow relative to the total flow, i.e., the speed of the pedestrians decreases if their stream changes from the major to minor stream. It is also observed that the maximum disruption that was induced by pedestrian flow from an intersecting angle occurs when the angle is approximately 135°.