title: Pedestrian dynamics in single-file movement of crowd with different age compositions.
abstract: An aging population is bringing new challenges to the management of escape routes and facility design in many countries. This paper investigates pedestrian movement properties of crowd with different age compositions. Three pedestrian groups are considered: young student group, old people group, and mixed group. It is found that traffic jams occur more frequently in mixed group due to the great differences of mobilities and self-adaptive abilities among pedestrians. The jams propagate backward with a velocity 0.4m/s for global density ρ_{g}≈1.75m^{-1} and 0.3m/s for ρ_{g}>2.3m^{-1}. The fundamental diagrams of the three groups are obviously different from each other and cannot be unified into one diagram by direct nondimensionalization. Unlike previous studies, three linear regimes in mixed group but only two regimes in young student group are observed in the headway-velocity relation, which is also verified in the fundamental diagram. Different ages and mobilities of pedestrians in a crowd cause the heterogeneity of system and influence the properties of pedestrian dynamics significantly. It indicates that the density is not the only factor leading to jams in pedestrian traffic. The composition of crowd has to be considered in understanding pedestrian dynamics and facility design.
authors: State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China.|Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute for Advanced Simulation, 52425 Jülich, Germany.
authors: Shuchao
authors: S
authors: Cao
authors: State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China.|Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute for Advanced Simulation, 52425 Jülich, Germany.
authors: Jun
authors: J
authors: Zhang
authors: Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Institute for Advanced Simulation, 52425 Jülich, Germany.
authors: Daniel
authors: D
authors: Salden
authors: School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China.
authors: Jian
authors: J
authors: Ma
authors: Tianshui Architectural Design Institute, Tianshui 741000, China.
authors: Chang'an
authors: C
authors: Shi
authors: Tianshui Health School, Tianshui 741000, China.
authors: Ruifang
authors: R
authors: Zhang
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009068:Movement; D000069636:Pedestrians; D011156:Population Density