The effect of obstacle layouts on regulating luggage-laden pedestrian flow through bottlenecks

Previous studies found that regulating luggage-laden pedestrian flow helps to reduce the negative influence caused by luggage. Inspired by this, we experimentally study the effect of obstacle layout on regulating luggage-laden pedestrian flow. Five distances between the obstacle and exit are considered. The main findings are as follows: (i) The obstacle position affects the lane formation but does not affect the spatial distance between luggage-laden pedestrians and the boundary. It is revealed that the exact distance parameter can be implied regardless of the distance from the exit when modelling luggage-laden pedestrian movement. (ii) The average speed at the bottleneck increases with the distance between the exit and obstacle regardless of the pedestrian with and without luggage. The sooner the luggage-laden crowd is regulated, the higher the crowd speed can be at the bottleneck. (iii) The deviation angles all rise immediately before the exit, which means that the actual movement direction of pedestrians before the exit is not towards the midpoint of the exit. In addition, the inflection point of the deviation angle is approximately 0.5 m from the exit regardless of the obstacle position, which is the validation parameter of the luggage-laden crowd modelling. The results concluded that luggage-laden pedestrian flow could be regulated, and quantitative parameters were proposed to model luggage-laden pedestrian movement through the bottleneck.