Lane formation in pedestrian counterflows driven by a potential field considering following and avoidance behaviours

Lane formation in pedestrian counterflows is an interesting self-organization phenomenon. It is believed to be caused by the following or avoidance behaviours of pedestrians. In this paper, a potential field CA model that considers the velocity and density distributions of a crowd and their subjective consciousness is proposed to study the effects of the two behaviours on lane formation in the case of a pedestrian counterflow in a corridor with a periodic boundary. An indexing system is introduced to distinguish the three different patterns observed in the counterflow, and a smoothness index is introduced to measure the smoothness of the counterflow. It is found that avoidance behaviour is more relevant to lane formation than following behaviour. Some differences between the two behaviours are also presented.