Bottleneck effects on the bidirectional crowd dynamics

The bottleneck effect on bidirectional crowd dynamics is of great theoretical and practical significance, especially for the designing of corridors in public places, such as subway stations or airports. Based on the famous social force model, this paper investigates the bottleneck effects on the free flow dynamics and breakdown phenomenon under different scenarios, in which different corridor shapes and inflow ratios are considered simultaneously. Numerical simulation finds an interesting self-organization phenomenon in the bidirectional flow, a typical characteristic of such a phenomenon is called lane formation, and the existence of which is independent of the corridor's shape and inflow rate. However, the pattern of the lane formed by pedestrian flow is related to the corridor's shape, and the free flow efficiency has close relationship with the inflow rate. Specifically, breakdown phenomenon occurs when inflows from both sides of the corridor are large enough, which mostly originates from the bottleneck and then gradually spreads to the other regions. Simulation results further indicate that the leaving efficiency becomes low as breakdown occurs, and the degree of congestion is proportional to the magnitude of inflow. The findings presented in this paper match well with some of our daily observations, hence it is possible to use them to provide us with theoretical suggestions in design of infrastructures.     

Pedestrian evacuation at the subway station under fire

With the development of urban rail transit, ensuring the safe evacuation of pedestrians at subway stations has become an important issue in the case of an emergency such as a fire. This paper chooses the platform of line 4 at the Beijing Xuanwumen subway station to study the emergency evacuation process under fire. Based on the established platform, effects of the fire dynamics, different initial pedestrian densities, and positions of fire on evacuation are investigated. According to simulation results, it is found that the fire increases the air temperature and the smoke density, and decreases pedestrians' visibility and walking velocity. Also, there is a critical initial density at the platform if achieving a safe evacuation within the required 6 minutes. Furthermore, different positions of fire set in this paper have little difference on crowd evacuation if the fire is not large enough. The suggestions provided in this paper are helpful for the subway operators to prevent major casualties.     

Neural adaptive chaotic control with constrained input using state and output feedback

This paper presents neural adaptive control methods for a class of chaotic nonlinear systems in the presence of constrained input and unknown dynamics.To attenuate the influence of constrained input caused by actuator saturation,an effective auxiliary system is constructed to prevent the stability of closed loop system from being destroyed.Radial basis function neural networks(RBF-NNs)are used in the online learning of the unknown dynamics,which do not require an off-line training phase.Both state and output feedback control laws are developed.In the output feedback case,high-order sliding mode(HOSM)observer is utilized to estimate the unmeasurable system states.Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of proposed schemes.