A crowd movement model for pedestrian flow through bottlenecks

One of the main objectives of crowd modeling is to optimize evacuation and improve the design of pedestrian facilities. In this work, a sensitivity analysis is performed to study the effect of the parameters of a 2D discrete crowd movement model on the nature of pedestrian’s collision and on evacuation times. After presenting the proposed model in its full version (three degrees of freedom for each individual), a pedestrian–pedestrian collision is considered. We identified the parameters that govern this type of collision and studied their effects on it. Then an evacuation experiment of a facility with a bottleneck exit is introduced and its configuration is used for numerical simulations. It is shown that without introducing a social repulsive force, the obtained flow rate values are much higher than the experimental ones. For this reason, we introduced the social force as defined by Helbing and performed a parametric study to find the set of optimized values of this force’s parameters that enables us to achieve simulation results close to the experimental ones. Using the values of the parameters obtained from the parametric study, the evacuation simulations give flow rate values that are closer to the experimental ones. The same optimized model is then used to find the density in front and inside the bottleneck and to reproduce the lane formation phenomenon as was observed in the experiment. Finally, the obtained results are analyzed and discussed.