PEDESTRIANS ARE NOT CIRCLES BUT ELLIPSES
Worldwide increasing urbanization leads to increasing number of mass events
like concerts with hundred thousand attendants.
Accurate simulations of pedestrian motion are needed in order to avoid
crowd disasters such as the 2010 Love parade in Duisburg,
Germany. However, so far the dynamics at high densities can not be
described satisfactorily by simple models.
In most models, pedestrians are represented by circular disks of fixed
size. However, we know that the step size increases with velocity
whereas the lateral swaying of the torso
decreases with increasing velocity.
Taking these effects into account by describing the pedestrians as ellipses
with velocity-dependent size we find a much more realistic description
of pedestrian flows especially at high densities. The model not only
reproduces the correct relation between pedestrian density and
velocity for both narrow and wide corridors, but is also considerably
simpler than previous models since it does not require special
mechanism to prevent unrealistic movement.
