Team-moving effect in bi-direction pedestrian flow

We propose a cellular automation model to simulate team-moving behavior in bi-directional pedestrian flow. The moving rules for double-pedestrian teaming include the constraint that pedestrians remain on adjacent cells. Phase transition, critical density — team number, velocity–density, and flow–density relationships are key component parts of the analysis. Simulations show that team-moving produces significant corridor capacity effects, and effects highly depend on the type of teaming behavior. In daily life, pedestrians prefer traverse teaming; under this bias, as teaming pedestrians increase in number, critical density reduces; that means traverse teaming will weaken the capacity of the corridor. The effect of traverse team-moving is nonlinear, and capacity will continually reduce as the team numbers increase; however, reduction rate will decay. We call this phenomenon, “the marginal utility of team-moving.”