Fluid-Based Analysis of Pedestrian Crowd at Bottlenecks

Abstract

In emergency egress crowd behavior critically affects egress efficiency and public safety. By integrating psychological principles to Newtonian motion of crowd, a fluid-based equation is derived in this paper to explore how energy in different forms is balanced when pedestrian crowd pass through a bottleneck. Such fluid-based analysis helps to bridge a gap among psychological findings, pedestrian models and simulation results, and it further provides a new perspective to understand how the faster-is-slower effect is caused and how disastrous events (e.g., jamming and stampede) occur at a bottleneck passage.