Toward Smooth Movement of Crowds

“Jamology” is an interdisciplinary research of all sorts of jams, e.g. those of vehicles, pedestrians, ants, etc. Our model of pedestrians, called the floor field model, is based on this study, and it is a two-dimensional generalization of an ant trail model. It is a rule-based cellular automaton model, and efficient in computations since the long-range interaction between pedestrians is imitated by the memory of the floor of only neighboring cells. Recently several generalizations of this model are proposed to make the model more realistic. We use an extended model to study how to make crowd movement smooth. Not only computer simulations but also experiments are shown in this paper. Introduction of pedestrians’ anticipation into the model affects the crowd movement significantly, and leads the counterflow smooth. Moreover it is clearly shown experimentally that evacuation dynamics near a bottleneck becomes smooth if we put an obstacle at a suitable place.