Fundamental diagrams of single-file pedestrian flow for different age groups

Abstract

In this paper properties of pedestrian movement are investigated with series of single-file experiments by considering the age composition of the crowd. Pedestrian trajectories with different age groups (young students group, old people group and mixed group) are extracted from the software PeTrack. It is found that the free velocity and maximum specific flow of young student group are the largest among three groups due to different mobility between young students and old people. More interestingly, the maximum specific flow of mixed group is smaller than that of old group, which indicates the jam occurs more easily in crowd composed of people with different movement abilities than that with homogeneous composition. At last, a nondimensional method con-sidering pedestrian free velocity and body size is used to scale the fundamental diagrams for different age groups. The study is helpful to understand evolution of pedestrian dynamics with different ages.