Understanding the Nature of Pedestrian Flow: A Review on Research Modeling

Crowd theory has drawn much attention from researchers owing to the sustained growth of urban population and transit passengers. Researchers have focused on modeling crowds and recording trajectories in order to analyze the characteristics of pedestrian flow and quantify person–person and person–environment interactions. This paper presents a survey of research on pedestrian flow. We depict the history of this research from the 1970s to the present and explore the points that researchers focused on. We then classify the research objectives and methods and summarize the relative achievements. Some advantages and disadvantages of different methods are discussed to help future researchers select suitable methods. Our review ends by indicating some possible future trends and challenges and proposing some possible directions for future research.