Scaling of pedestrian channel flow with a bottleneck

Pedestrian channel flow at a bottleneck is investigated under the open boundaries by using the lattice-gas model of biased random walkers. It is shown that a dynamical phase transition occurs from the free flow to the choking flow at a critical density pc with increasing density. The flow rate saturates at higher density than the critical density. In the choking-flow region, a scaling behavior is found as follows: the saturated flow rate Js scales as Js∝d0.93±0.02 and the critical density pc scales as pc∝(d/W)1.16±0.02, where d is the width of the bottleneck and W is the width of channel. The plot of the rescaled flow rate against the rescaled density collapses onto a single curve.