Experimental Study On The Movement Of Pedestrian Flow Mixed With Wheelchair Users In Straight Corridors And Exits

Nowadays,with the aging of the world’s population and the resulting increase of disabilities,the number of wheelchair users are also getting increased.Considering the smaller movement abilities of wheelchair users,it is important to study the pedestrian evacuation including wheelchair users when facing the congestion of crowd in public ar-eas for the purpose of improving the evacuation efficiency of pedestrian flow and public security.Corridors and bottlenecks are common scenarios in the evacuation of pedes-trians.Considering the deficiency of current researches,we have studied the movement characteristics and rules of heterogeneous pedestrian flow including wheelchair users by the method of controlled experiments based on the experiment video clips and the data on pedestrian trajectories extracted from the clips.First of all,we studied the motion characteristics of wheelchair users in their free movements and the restricted movements in the crowd.By fitting the relationship be-tween the speed and time,the relaxation time is quantified.Other factors including proxemic value and border distance are also analyzed to study the interaction between wheelchair users and the surrounding pedestrians.The results show that the motion dif-ferences between wheelchair users and normal people are related to their motion states.When walking as usual,the border distances between wheelchair users and normal peo-ple are similar.When moving fast,the border distance of wheelchair user decreases because they tend to move close to the fixed wall at this time.Meanwhile,there is a typical phenomenon that pedestrians keep a larger distance from wheelchair users in the restricted movement.There is a difference between the forward and backward proxemic value of wheelchair users and the difference becomes more obvious when moving fast.Secondly,we studied the movement characteristics of the heterogeneous pedestrian flow including wheelchair users in corridors and the exit of bottleneck.The difference of the fundamental diagrams,time-space relations and headway between the heteroge-neous and homogeneous pedestrian flow are analyzed and the influence of mixing ratio of wheelchair users on the movement characteristics of pedestrian flow are obtained.Based on the heterogeneous pedestrian flow with the uniform distribution of wheelchair users in this study,the results show that the evolution of the fundamental diagrams of the two pedestrian flows are similar in the corridor.However,the critical density and peak flow rate of the heterogeneous pedestrian flow are smaller than those of homo-geneous pedestrian flow.The growth patterns of the proxemic value between the two pedestrian flows are different.With respect to the pedestrian flow at exit,the existance of wheelchair users leads to the density inhomogeneity.There is a positive correlation between the degree of heterogeneity and the mixing ratio of wheelchair users.Finally,we studied the influence of the bottleneck angles on the evacuation effi-ciency of the heterogeneous pedestrian flow including wheelchair users at the exit.The congestion at the exit is quantified by fitting the parameters of the power-law distribu-tion of time headway.The evacuation time and waiting ratio are analyzed to explore the optimization angle of improving traffic efficiency.Moreover,by analyzing the de-tour phenomenon of pedestrian at the exit,the actual walking distance and speed of pedestrian flow is considered comprehensively to study the reasons on the influence of different angles on the traffic efficiency of heterogeneous crowd quantitatively.The re-sults show that the influence of the bottleneck angle and the selection of the efficiency optimization angle are related to the mixing ratio of wheelchair users.Based on the het-erogeneous pedestrian flow set in this study,when the mixing ratio is less than 2.35%,there is an optimization angle to improve the traffic efficiency.When the mixing ratio increases,the pedestrian flow becomes more crowded at the exit with changed angles because of the larger occupied area that wheelchair users take.