Influence of rotation on pedestrian flow considering bipedal features: Modeling using a fine discrete floor field cellular automaton

Previous studies assume pedestrians rotate with a single axis (often the geometric center of agents in simulation) for simple implementation, which ignores the asymmetry and bipedal features of pedestrian behavior. Therefore, for a higher level of simulation realism, we propose a floor field cellular automaton simulating the rotation with a dual-axis considering bipedal features. Validated by the experimental results, the simulation of pedestrians with the dual-axis rotation fits well with the empirical data, much better than the center-axis rotation. Then, we investigated the influence of rotation on the pedestrian flow in three typical scenarios where one could frequently observe the rotation behavior. The findings reveal that the rotation behaviors significantly influence the crowd phenomena of pedestrians, including the travel and flow efficiency, the shape of arching and trajectories of the crowd, and the lane formation. The pedestrians with the dual-axis rotation flow fluently and efficiently when passing through a bottleneck or a crowd: (1) in the case of single-exit room evacuation, the dual-axis rotation improves the efficiency by 5%–150%; (2) in the case of unidirectional flow in the L-shaped passage, the improved efficiency by the dual-axis rotation is about 30%; (3) in the counter flow, the dual-axis rotation greatly relieves the unrealistic congestion.