Pedestrian dynamics with different corridor widths: Investigation on a series of uni-directional and bi-directional experiments

In order to investigate the characteristics of uni- and bi-directional pedestrian flow, we organized 4 large-scale experiments from 2016 to 2019, and different corridor widths (W = 2.5 m, 2 m, 1.5 m and 1 m) are adopted. For uni-directional movement, either larger (W = 2.5 m) or smaller (W = 1 m) corridor width can slow down the pedestrians, thus the averaged flow rates with medium corridor widths (W = 2 m or 1.5 m) are higher. Besides, some other factors which can influence uni-directional movement are evaluated, including initial status, order of round and fluctuations of flow rates. For bi-directional movement, the lane formation processes could be categorized into five types. For Type 1 or 2, three or two lanes are directly formed. But for Type 3 or 4, the process is finished by two stages. For Type 5, the process just stagnates. After the lane formation, the averaged bi-directional flow rates when W = 2.5 m are higher than that of uni-directional ones, while in other three experiments they are nearly the same. All these results can help us learn more about the essence of pedestrian flow. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.