Pedestrian dynamics with different corridor widths: Investigation on a series of uni-directional and bi-directional experiments

In order to investigate the characteristics of uni- and bi-directional pedestrian flow, we organized 4 large-scale experiments from 2016 to 2019, and different corridor widths (W= 2.5 m, 2 m, 1.5 m and 1 m) are adopted. For uni-directional movement, either larger (W= 2.5 m) or smaller (W= 1 m) corridor width can slow down the pedestrians, thus the averaged flow rates with medium corridor widths (W= 2 m or 1.5 m) are higher. Besides, some other factors which can influence uni-directional movement are evaluated, including initial status, order of round and fluctuations of flow rates. For bi-directional movement, the lane formation processes could be categorized into five types. For Type 1 or 2, three or two lanes are directly formed. But for Type 3 or 4, the process is finished by two stages. For Type 5, the process just stagnates. After the lane formation, the averaged bi-directional flow rates when W= 2.5 m are higher than that of uni-directional ones, while in other three experiments they are nearly the same. All these results can help us learn more about the essence of pedestrian flow.