Homogeneity and Activeness of Crowd on Aged Pedestrian Dynamics

An aging population is bringing new challenges to the management of escape routes and facility design in many countries. In this paper the movement properties of middle- and old-aged adults are studied with series of single-file movement experiments under laboratory conditions. The fundamental diagrams for two different groups of pedestrians and time-space diagrams are compared. For the groups with different composition and status, the fundamental diagrams are totally different but maintain the same trend. Active crowd leads to inhomogeneous pedestrian flow but higher flow rate, while inactive pedestrians prefer to keep pace with others or keep larger personal space, which leads to more jams and stop-and-go waves. Density and inhomogeneous of speed do not always play main roles on the appearance of stop-and-go.