Experimental Investigation on the Pair Interaction Between Pedestrians

Both experimental and numerical studies indicate local interaction among pedestrians plays an important role in determining the self-organization of pedestrian traffic. However, little is know to the form of the interaction. We explore the fundamental interaction between pedestrians by performing controlled experiments in a long narrow channel where pedestrians were asked to first walking freely in the channel, then to evade a standing still pedestrian in the middle of the channel. Trajectories of these pedestrians extracted from the video-recordings of the experiments were then used to analyze detailed microscopic moving features. Averaged change of speed as well as the change of direction of these pedestrians was then calculated. An angular and metric distance based interaction map reviewing the laws ruling the behavioral changes when a pedestrian interacts with others was detailed. This study provides further insights to the fundamental individual level interaction between pedestrians for understanding the pedestrian dynamic and is expected to be helpful in evacuation analysis.