A higher-order macroscopic model for pedestrian flows

This paper develops a higher-order macroscopic model of pedestrian crowd dynamics derived from fluid dynamics that consists of two-dimensional Euler equations with relaxation. The desired directional motion of pedestrians is determined by an Eikonal-type equation, which describes a problem that minimizes the instantaneous total walking cost from origin to destination. A linear stability analysis of the model demonstrates its ability to describe traffic instability in crowd flows. The algorithm to solve the macroscopic model is composed of a splitting technique introduced to treat the relaxation terms, a second-order positivity-preserving central-upwind scheme for hyperbolic conservation laws, and a fast-sweeping method for the Eikonal-type equation on unstructured meshes. To test the applicability of the model, we study a challenging pedestrian crowd flow problem of the presence of an obstruction in a two-dimensional continuous walking facility. The numerical results indicate the rationality of the model and the effectiveness of the computational algorithm in predicting the flux or density distribution and the macroscopic behavior of the pedestrian crowd flow. The simulation results are compared with those obtained by the two-dimensional Lighthill–Whitham–Richards pedestrian flow model with various model parameters, which further shows that the macroscopic model is able to correctly describe complex phenomena such as “stop-and-go waves” observed in empirical pedestrian flows.