Studying the Pedestrian Level-of-Service (PLoS): Lessons regarding the combination of survey and monitoring data

Crowding is often analyzed using crowd dynamics variables. Yet, it is questionable whether quantitative variables fully describe the perception of crowdedness. This paper presents four case studies into the Pedestrian Level-of-Service (PLoS), featuring a 1) mass event, 2) shopping environment, 3) festival, and 4) touristic hotspot. The...

Neural network model for predicting variation in walking dynamics of pedestrians in social groups

Pedestrian spaces are increasingly becoming popular locations for shopping, recreation, festivities, and other social activities. Therefore, an improved understanding of the factors that make walking environments enjoyable and safe is essential. Most existing studies focus on modelling walking behaviours of individual pedestrians. However,...

Enhancing crowd monitoring system functionality through data fusion: Estimating flow rate from wi-fi traces and automated counting system data

Crowd monitoring systems (CMSs) provide a state-of-the-art solution to manage crowds objectively. Most crowd monitoring systems feature one type of sensor, which severely limits the insights one can simultaneously gather regarding the crowd’s traffic state. Incorporating multiple functionally complementary sensor types is expensive. CMSs are...

Analysis and Modelling of Pedestrian Movement Dynamics at Large-scale Events

To what extent can we model the movements of pedestrians who walk across a large-scale event terrain? This dissertation answers this question by analysing the operational movement dynamics of pedestrians in crowds at several large music and sport events in the Netherlands and extracting the key crowd movement phenomena. A conceptual model and an...

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...

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...

Exploring the Relationship of Exit Flow and Jam Density in Panic Scenarios Using Animal Dynamics

There are few studies investigating crowd dynamics in panic situations. They used measures such as exit flow rate to explore the exit performance in evacuation scenarios. However, there is limited research exploring the relationship of exit flow rate and density behind the exit for panic scenarios. This study presents a macro level analysis to...

Analysis of Pedestrian Crowd Movements at Lowlands

Several pedestrian crowd events that became disasters occurred in the last decade. Most of these events were either religious festivals, sport or music events. Even though these events are organized frequently, not a lot is known about pedestrian crowd movements. One of the key problems in the analysis is the lack of crowd movement data....