Validation of Collision-Free Speed Model in Bottlenecks

The pedestrians' safety has attracted increasing attention, especially in large-scale gatherings. A large number of models have been proposed to simulate the movement characteristics of pedestrians. The collision-free speed model can qualitatively reproduce many self-organized phenomena well when there is no pushing and squeezing in the crowd. In addition, as a first-order model its computational efficiency is relatively high compared to force-based models. In this work, we validate the model quantitatively against empirical data from bottleneck experiments. The parameters controlling the desired speed and pedestrians' initial position distribution are adjusted to reproduce the empirical data. The Voronoi-method is used to calculate the density, speed and flow. It is shown that the model can reproduce the relation between the flow and the density when the initial density is less than 3.33 m^-2. However, other characteristics in the simulation such as trajectories in the bottleneck and relation between flow and bottleneck width diverge to some extent from the experimental findings.