Evaluating Bottleneck Magnitude of Massive Crowd Flow Networks

Under scenario of sports events and other kind of mass gathering, a large amount of people would travel along road networks, thus forming crowded pedestrians. In the crowds, the density would be so high that it might trigger mass panic and stampede, causing serious injuries and casualties. Therefore, it is necessary to understand pedestrian flow features on the corresponding network and then apply proper control method to organize and manage pedestrian flow. Firstly, considering general characteristics of travelers´ route choice behavior, all these pedestrians are assigned onto the road network via a traffic assignment model. Secondly, a nonlinear pedestrian road impedance function is introduced to address the congestion effects of massive crowds, and the pedestrian travel time changing rate is calculated for each link under various traffic volumes. It is proposed to sort network links according to the travel time changing rate as an evaluation of the link bottleneck magnitude. Finally, the Love Parade 2010 in Duisburg (an electronic music festival) is adopted as a case study to illustrate the applicability of the proposed network bottleneck magnitude evaluating method.