Simulation of bi-directional pedestrian flow through a bottleneck: Cell transmission model

We propose an extended cell transmission model with regular hexagonal cell representation to simulate the bi-directional pedestrian flow through a bottleneck. We take humility behavior among pedestrians into the model as a set of parameters. Without loss of generality, this model simulates the boarding and alighting process of passengers for a specific scenario, i.e., the platform area of train or subway. By numerical simulations, we find that the parameters representing humility behavior have significant influence on the fundamental diagrams and the density distribution of pedestrians. By setting the humility parameters reasonably, the congestion can be alleviated and the total boarding and alighting time can be reduced. Moreover, by analyzing the effects of different widths of bottleneck, the conclusion that the pedestrian flow increases linearly as the bottleneck width increases can be obtained. By comparing two different boarding and alighting rules, it can be suggested that the general rule “alighting first and boarding second” may not always be the most effective one. Some self-organization phenomena, including following and avoidance behavior, spillback, dissipation, and lane formation are also shown in this paper. •Propose an extended cell transmission model.•Take humility behavior among pedestrians into the model as a set of parameters.•Investigate the relations between pedestrian flow and widths of bottlenecks.•Compare different boarding and alighting rules and discrete methods.