Pedestrian Flow Through Complex Infrastructure, Experiments, and Mass-Transport Processes

Simple mass-transport model is used to describe the phenomenon of decreasing bottleneck flow during egress of pedestrians through complex infrastructure. The considered mass-transport model combines the macroscopic hydrodynamics approach with concept of queuing processes (thus belongs to the class of hand-calculation models). The realization of such process can be described by means of temporal evolution of the flow through individual bottlenecks and number of pedestrians in front of given bottleneck. These two state variables are used to compare the model prediction with experimental data from two original experiments. The commonly used approach of constant width-related bottleneck capacity cannot capture the observed decrease of flow caused by the loss of motivation while the room is getting empty. Therefore, the dynamical part of the bottleneck capacity derived from the slope of the temporal evolution of the crowd size has been introduced, in order to capture the phenomenon.