Simulation of Pedestrian Rotation Dynamics Near Crowded Exits

Pedestrian evacuation simulation is vital for urban civil engineers. Although there exist many works addressing the issue of emergency evacuation, only a few study the phenomenon of people actively squeezing to pass through an exit. To model this behavior, a three-circle model is adopted to represent the shape of pedestrians. Active rotation torque (ART) is proposed to model the active rotation behavior of pedestrians turning their torsos in the desired direction. This torque occurs either when a pedestrian is not facing his velocity direction, or when he wants to pass through a bottleneck. The equation of ART is designed and regressed with real pedestrian experiments, in which a gyroscope was used to measure the angle of torso rotation. The proposed torque model is then applied to manifold scenarios with various door widths and different safety separation belt settings. Then, both microscopic and macroscopic indexes, including evacuation time, rotation angle, and crowd density, are obtained to show that the proposed model can simulate both non-competitive and competitive pedestrian behaviors near exit bottlenecks more accurately than the circular social force model. Thus, the evacuation time of the exit can be predicted more precisely, which helps to design optimal multi-exit assignment strategies.