Bottleneck flow refers to the movement of pedestrians through a spatially constrained passage or corridor segment where the available width is narrower than the surrounding space, causing a local reduction in flow capacity and the emergence of congestion, queuing, and self-organized collective dynamics upstream of the constriction. It matters for pedestrian dynamics research because bottlenecks are a critical determinant of evacuation efficiency, crowd safety, and facility design, as the relationship between flow rate, density, and velocity at such points governs whether dangerous crowd conditions develop. Key variants include studies at different scales of analysis, from microscopic trajectory-level investigations that resolve individual spacing and timing behaviors to macroscopic continuum formulations that model aggregate density and flux fields, as well as distinctions based on bottleneck geometry such as doorways, corridors, or merging passages with varying width ratios.
Source Papers
- A crowd team evacuation model considering spring effect ↗ — A crowd team evacuation model considering spring effect
- A high-resolution meshfree particle method for numerical investigation of second-order macroscopic pedestrian flow models ↗ — A high-resolution meshfree particle method for numerical inv
- Microscopic insights into pedestrian motion through a bottleneck, resolving spatial and temporal variations ↗ — Microscopic insights into pedestrian motion through a bottle
- Physics of Human Crowds ↗ — Physics of Human Crowds
- Revisiting Hughes’ dynamic continuum model for pedestrian flow and the development of an efficient solution algorithm ↗ — Revisiting Hughes’ dynamic continuum model for pedestrian fl
- State-of-the-art crowd motion simulation models ↗ — State-of-the-art crowd motion simulation models