Experimental study on unidirectional pedestrian flows in a corridor with a fixed obstacle and a temporary obstacle

Pedestrians may encounter obstacles during walking, and necessary actions such as reducing velocity and changing the walking direction will be made to avoid collisions. Previous studies on the effect of obstacles on pedestrian dynamics mainly focused on fixed obstacles, but the influence of temporary obstacles, such as the sudden stop caused by a moving pedestrian, has not been investigated. In this paper, a series of controlled experiments were conducted to explore the influence of fixed obstacles and temporary obstacles on the unidirectional pedestrian flow in a corridor. For the fixed obstacle, it was found that pedestrians would change their walking direction and reducing velocity at varied distances away from the obstacle. Interestingly, right side preference during evading maneuvers can be observed, and some pedestrians are not urgent to return to the initial route after passing by the obstacle. In terms of temporary obstacles, such as the sudden stop during pedestrian movement, influences of stop duration, stop position, crowd density on pedestrian movements and evading behaviors of the affected pedestrians at different positions were studied. Generally, the longer the stop duration, the more pedestrians would be affected, and the affected pedestrians may change their routes at a further distance from the temporary obstacle. By analyzing the stop position, a temporary stop near the boundary would be a better choice when compared to that in the middle part of the corridor, since other pedestrians are less affected. In addition, in an environment with a relatively high crowd density, the affected pedestrians would usually experience significant decrease in velocity and obvious deviation in their trajectory. For pedestrians in the same lane with the temporary obstacle, it is obvious that the person right behind the pedestrian would be the most affected. With the increase in the sequence number after the temporary obstacle, the influence on velocity and target drift angle will gradually be reduced. The results of the present study can contribute to the relative modeling of pedestrian dynamics with fixed and temporary obstacles, and provide useful insights to crowd management.