The study of the influence of obstacles on crowd dynamics

This paper presents the research on the influence of obstacles on crowd dynamics. We have performed experiments for four base scenarios of interaction in crowd: unidirectional flow, bidirectional flow, merging flows and intersection. Movement of pedestrians has been studied in simple shape areas: straight corridor, T-junction and intersection. The volumes and basic directions of pedestrian flows were determined for each of the areas. Layout of physical obstacles has been built from different combinations of columns and barriers. In order to acquire characteristics of the crowd dynamics a set of simulations was conducted using PULSE simulation environment. In the result, we have managed to obtain several dependences between layout of obstacles and crowd dynamics were obtained.