Determining the Density Experienced by Pedestrians in Unstable Flow Situations

In recent years several methods have been proposed to compute the density of a crowd. Several studies have shown that the fundamental diagrams produced by means of these methods differ greatly depending on the chosen density computation method, especially in unstable flow situations where pedestrians are unequally distributed over the infrastructure. The results of these studies suggest that two density computation methods are to be preferred, namely the Voronoi and the XT-method. In light of these results, the question rises which of these two computation methods provides better results in more intricate flow situations that are unstable by nature.This study shows that when computing the density of pedestrian movements in confined spaces, the differences in the results generated by the two methods are limited. This study, furthermore, ascertains that the XT-method provides more realistic results for non-confined spaces.