Proposition and Testing of a Conceptual Model Describing the Movement of Individual Pedestrians within a Crowd

Our understanding of crowd movements has rapidly improved over the course of the last decades. This study shows that the empirical research has not kept up with the pace of the simulation studies. Based on an extensive literature review, this study proposes a conceptual model describing the movements of individuals within a crowd. The model features the relationships between the macroscopic flow variables and characteristics of the pedestrians, their physiologic environment and the surrounding infrastructure in which they reside. Using trajectory data sets gathered during large-scale pedestrian events in the Netherlands, the conceptual model has been statistically tested. The results show that the proposed framework is capable of explaining trends featured by the macroscopic flow variables based on the before mentioned characteristics.