Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 310
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-30531-8

Regular Article

The walking behavior of pedestrian crowd under impact of static and movable targets^*

¹ School of Transportation Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, 230009 Hefei, P.R. China
² Research center for advanced science and techno, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1, Komaba, Meguro-ku, 113-8656 Tokyo, Japan

^a e-mail: dingjianxun@hfut.edu.cn

Received: 27 February 2012
Published online: 8 July 2013

Abstract

The modeling of human behavior is a significant approach to reproduce realistic pedestrian flow phenomena. According to the social force model, pedestrians’ motion is principally driven by self-organized processes, which depend on local interactions among pedestrians. In this work, an extended social force model is proposed to simulate pattern of pedestrians in the settings where the repulsive force is inversely proportional to the distances between pedestrians and target point. Target point represents a static attractant like exit and wall, or movable objects like players on the stage and teachers on the platform. Due to such distance a novel sector-like pedestrian pattern emerges, which differs from the traditional semicircle-like formation. Furthermore, while the target moving, the following pedestrians form a comet-like configuration. With the increasing velocity of target point, more pedestrians cannot keep up with it, and the comet-tail becomes much longer. These results will be of great value in future gathered infrastructures planning and operations.