Social And Physical Pedestrian Sizes And Their Impact On The Decision-Based Modelling

During the pedestrian movement in an environment, every attendant contributes to the total crowd mass by their own (physical) volume. However, this is not appropriate enough to describe pedestrian behaviour which is an important aspect to build or improve a pedestrian model and make it predictable. This paper deals with the model features considering a social impact on pedestrian size. Even though the physical (minimum) pedestrian size can be known and estimated from the real data using distance of human shoulders, i.e. is fixed, it tells us nothing about their current (social) size. Moreover, the fact that every pedestrian has the same physical size does not imply that they have the same social size in the current time - the social size can vary during the time with respect to the surroundings of the pedestrian. Furthermore, the sizes how the pedestrian are seen and how they feel are different, i.e. pedestrians decide about their own (social) compression in a crowd. To understand these properties properly, the author’s decision-based model is introduced including ruling principles capturing pedestrian movement in both free flow and congestion. The impact of social and physical sizes on prediction power of the model is discussed. An experimental data of passing through a room with one exit are used for comparing the results.