Modeling crowd turbulence by many-particle simulations

A recent study [D. Helbing, A. Johansson, and H. Z. Al-Abideen, Phys. Rev. E 75, 046109 (2007)] has revealed a turbulent state of pedestrian flows, which is characterized by sudden displacements and causes the falling and trampling of people. However, turbulent crowd motion is not reproduced well by current many-particle models due to their insufficient representation of the local interactions in areas of extreme densities. In this contribution, we extend the repulsive force term of the social force model to reproduce crowd turbulence. We perform numerical simulations of pedestrians moving through a bottleneck area with this model. The transitions from laminar to stop-and-go and turbulent flows are observed. The empirical features characterizing crowd turbulence, such as the structure function and the probability density function of velocity increments, are reproduced well; i.e., they are well compatible with an analysis of video data during the annual Muslim pilgrimage.