Pedestrian Dynamics: Experimental Investigation of the Fundamental Diagram Across Cultures رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

The dynamics of pedestrians are normally controlled and influenced by several factors that shape the flow, velocity, and density of various pedestrian groups. Some of these factors are related to pedestrian compositions. Over the past few years, several experimental studies have been conducted to identify and understand the impact of such factors on pedestrian movement characteristics. Among the most important experiments have been carried out in an attempt to investigate the dynamics of pedestrians in narrow corridors with closed boundary conditions. The advantage of this simplified set-up is the ease to control the density, which enables studying the so-called Fundamental Diagram (density-velocity relation, FD) in a controlled and consistent manner. The goal of this research is to investigate the physical movement characteristics of Palestinian pedestrians using the density-velocity, velocity-headway, and density-headway relations for single-file movement experiments conducted with an emphasis on various gender compositions. We compared the experiment findings against similar experiments that have been conducted in other cultures, namely in Germany and India. Moreover, we perform a comparative analysis concerning the age factor, by comparing our results with two types of experiments that have been conducted in China: young, and old pedestrians. After identifying the factors that control the dynamics of pedestrians, we used them to investigate the impact of each factor on the movement decisions and further predict future movement characteristics using artificial neural networks. Our proposed model precisely forecasts future velocities and headway distances for various pedestrian compositions and densities for singlefile movement experiments. The proposed prediction model was validated using two trajectory datasets from Palestine and China.