Experimental study and quantitative analysis on microscopic movement characteristics of pedestrian through multiple parallel bottleneck in transportation hub complex

Abstract

The multiple parallel bottlenecks, such as ticket entrance and station exit, are common facilities in the Transportation Hub Complex (THC) of China. The interaction between adjacent openings of multiple parallel bottlenecks on pedestrian flow has been rarely investigated by previous researchers. In this article, the microscopic moving behavior parameters of pedestrians passing through multiple bottlenecks, such as flow rate, velocity, time interval between two sequential pedestrians, and specific flow rate, were extracted based on video image processing technology. To investigate the effect of opening numbers of multiple bottlenecks on pedestrian flow movement, three different opening numbers, namely one, two, and three openings, were considered in the simulation experiments. In the scenarios of two and three openings, three opening widths, namely 0.75 m, 0.85 m, and 0.95 m, were respectively considered. Meanwhile, the distance intervals between adjacent openings of bottleneck were also explored in this study. Through analyzing the microscopic movement behavior parameters of pedestrians, it is found that the change of those parameters with the increasing bottleneck width can be divided into three domains according to the openings number in these scenarios. Those parameters in different domains show mutually independent change trend with increasing bottleneck width. The results also indicate that those parameters show certain regularities with the increase of distance interval. This study provides fundamental data and analysis of the pedestrian flow passing through the multiple parallel bottlenecks. The results will be useful for the development and verification of evacuation models.