Modeling and simulation of weaving pedestrian flow in subway stations

Abstract

There are differences in efficiency when pedestrian flows with various directions pass through the bottleneck of a subway in different manners, and the mechanisms of congestion at the bottleneck are distinct as well. The weaving motion of pedestrian flows with various directions in subways is simplified into two crowds with different ODs passing through the bottleneck which connects two parallel channels. The lattice gas model is improved by introducing the floor field so that it is suitable for the description of pedestrian flow under complex situations. It is shown by experiments that different ways lead to the difference in total time when the crowds pass through the field of interest. Then the total time of crowds passing through the field in different ways is investigated numerically, and the effect of bottleneck width is taken into account as well. Numerical simulations confirm the findings from experiments. It is found that the diagonal movement of a pedestrian should be included in the model in order to give a better description of real pedestrian traffic. And the mechanism of congestion near the bottleneck is discussed in detail.