A new lattice hydrodynamic model for bidirectional pedestrian flow with consideration of pedestrians’ honk effect

Abstract

Understanding the pedestrian behavior contributes to traffic simulation and facility design/redesign. In practice, the interactions between individual pedestrians can lead to virtual honk effect, such as urging surrounding pedestrians to walk faster in a crowded environment. To better reflect the reality, this paper proposes a new lattice hydrodynamic model for bidirectional pedestrian flow with consideration of pedestrians’ honk effect. To this end, the concept of critical density is introduced to define the occurrence of pedestrians’ honk event. In the linear stability analysis, the stability condition of the new bidirectional pedestrian flow model is given based on the perturbation method, and the neutral stability curve is also obtained. Based on this, it is found that the honk effect has a significant impact on the stability of pedestrian flow. In the nonlinear stability analysis, the modified Korteweg–de Vries (mKdV) equation of the model is obtained based on the reductive perturbation method. By solving the mKdV equation, the kink-antikink soliton wave is obtained to describe the propagation mechanism and rules of pedestrian congestion near the neutral stability curve. The simulation example shows that the pedestrians’ honk effect can mitigate the pedestrians crowding efficiently and improve the stability of the bidirectional pedestrian flow.