A Study on Impatient Pedestrian Effect on Bi-directional Pedestrian Movement by Using Ant Algorithms

This paper aims to revisit the bidirectional walking of pedestrians to contribute to a more realistic definition of the case of the presence of impatient pedestrians and to depict the effect of including impatient walkers in the pure bi-directional system of “normal” walking pedestrians. It is found that when a trace amount of impatient pedestrians are added to the system, it affects traffic in a disruptive way at low densities, however, it affects constructively at medium and high densities interestingly. When adding a comparable amount of impatient pedestrians to the system it is seen that at low and medium densities, the flux of motion and the order parameter together change in parallel, conversely, at high densities, the high number of impatient pedestrians positively affects the lane formation, therefore, pedestrian mobility remains high despite high density and disorder. As a result, more impatient pedestrians may not always mean more congested traffic. Sometimes, a certain density of impatient pedestrians can positively affect the bi-directional pedestrian traffic flow.