Crowd movements during exceptional events

Optimal crowd evacuation

This paper deals with the optimal allocation of routes, destination, and departure times to members of a crowd, for instance in case of an evacuation or another hazardous situation in which the people need to leave the area as quickly as possible. The generic approach minimizes the evacuation times, considering the demand dependent waiting times...

Proposition and testing of a conceptual model describing the movement of individual pedestrians within a crowd

Our understanding of crowd movements has rapidly improved over the course of the last decades. This study shows that the empirical research has not kept up with the pace of the simulation studies. Based on an extensive literature review, this study proposes a conceptual model describing the movements of individuals within a crowd. The model...

Estimating travel times using Wi-Fi sensor data

Determining travel time information from Wi-Fi (or Bluetooth) sensors is not trivial due to various (often technical) reasons. In this contribution, we focus on the problem of distinguishing travel time from the time people spend performing activities (e.g. fuelling the car, standing still to watch the scenery, buying a train ticket). More...

The influence of the interaction characteristics on the movement dynamics of pedestrians

One of the fundamental properties of pedestrian simulation models is their capability to predict the future movement dynamics of pedestrians depending on the current state of the pedestrian traffic flow, more specically the walking behaviour of neighbouring pedestrians. This paper investigates the influence of the interaction characteristics on...

Comparing three types of real-time data collection techniques: Counting cameras, Wi-Fi sensors and GPS trackers

Nowadays, many large scale events are organised in urban areas that are not designed to accomodate these large visitor flows, as not only the sheer number of people is larger than anticipated, but also their behaviour is different. For a timely deployment of crowd management measures, continuous information on the real-time traffic state on the...

Spatial Analytics for the Identification of Salient Urban Areas

Evaluating a data-driven approach for choice set identification

The specification of the choice set for travel behaviour analysis is a non-trivial task, as its size and composition are known to influence the results of model estimation and prediction. Most studies specify the choice set using choice set generation algorithms. These methods can introduce two severe errors to the specified choice set: false...

How do people cycle in Amsterdam? Estimating cyclists’ route choice determinants using GPS data from an urban area

Nowadays, the bicycle is seen as a sustainable and healthy substitute for the car in urban environments. The Netherlands is the leading country in terms of bicycle use, especially in urban environments. Yet route choice models featuring inner-city travel that include cyclists are lacking. This paper estimates a cyclists’ route choice model for...

Multi-objective calibration framework for pedestrian simulation models: study on the effect of movement base cases, metrics and density levels

Determinants of the consideration mode choice set

A Markov-chain activity-based model for pedestrians in office buildings

As the number of people working in office buildings increases, there is an urgent need to improve building services, such as lighting and temperature control, within these buildings to increase energy efficiency and well-being of occupants. A pedestrian behaviour model that simulates office occupants’ movements and locations can provide the high...

Pedestrian exit choice behavior during an evacuation - a comparison study between field and VR experiment

Understanding pedestrian exit choice behavior during emergency situations is important for improving evacuation efficiency. Virtual Reality is a promising technique that can be used to study pedestrian evacuation behavior. However, studies comparing evacuation behavior in real and virtual environments are still scarce. This paper explores...

Developing a VR tool for studying pedestrian movement and choice behavior

This paper presents a new VR research tool to systemically study pedestrian movement and choice behavior. This new VR tool, called CivilEvac, features a complex multi-level building that is an exact copy of an existing building. CivilEvac allows participants to freely navigate through the building, records their movements and vision fields at...

The Impact of Guidance Information on Exit Choice Behavior During an Evacuation: A VR study

This paper presents a Virtual Reality (VR) experiment to study pedestrian exit choice behavior during evacuations. It investigates whether and to what extent different types of guidance information (i.e. exit signs and directional signs) influence pedestrian exit choice during an evacuation (drill). The analysis focuses on the commonalities...

Rotation Behaviour of Pedestrians in Bidirectional and Crossing Flows

Rotating ones body is a strategy pedestrians commonly use to avoid collisions. Even though this behaviour impacts capacity heavily, this rotation behaviour is seldomly studied. This research aims to increase insight into rotation behaviour of pedestrians in high density bidirectional and crossing flows. Based on data from the CrowdLimits...