Towards modelling abreast to in-file transitions in small pedestrian groups

Abstract

Pedestrians in a crowd largely walk in small groups, dyads above all, and modelling how these groups arrange themselves is a step towards realistic models of the crowd as a whole. A dyad walks side by side in a dilute crowd and one behind the other in a dense one, an abreast to in-file transition recently measured in real life across the full range of naturally occurring crowd conditions (van der Laan and Corbetta, PLOS ONE 2026). The cost-function models of dyad formation by Zanlungo and coworkers (Phys. Rev. E 2014; EPL 2015) hold the pair abreast and have no in-file minimum at any finite density. Building on them, we propose and analyse a qualitative model in which the transition appears as an effective density parameter grows: the two formations become minima that coexist over a window of densities and exchange stability within it. We quantify this transition by computing the Orientation Log-Odds ΠOLO as predicted by the model. This paper is a first step towards quantitative models of dyads and of their formation transitions.

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BibTeX RIS

BibTeX

@misc{corbetta2026towards,
  title = {{Towards modelling abreast to in-file transitions in small pedestrian groups}},
  author = {Alessandro Corbetta and Chiel van der Laan and Francesco Zanlungo},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.16400},
  eprint = {2610.16400},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16400},
}

RIS

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Towards modelling abreast to in-file transitions in small pedestrian groups
AU  - Alessandro Corbetta
AU  - Chiel van der Laan
AU  - Francesco Zanlungo
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/12
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.16400
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16400
AB  - Pedestrians in a crowd largely walk in small groups, dyads above all, and modelling how these groups arrange themselves is a step towards realistic models of the crowd as a whole. A dyad walks side by side in a dilute crowd and one behind the other in a dense one, an abreast to in-file transition recently measured in real life across the full range of naturally occurring crowd conditions (van der Laan and Corbetta, PLOS ONE 2026). The cost-function models of dyad formation by Zanlungo and coworkers (Phys. Rev. E 2014; EPL 2015) hold the pair abreast and have no in-file minimum at any finite density. Building on them, we propose and analyse a qualitative model in which the transition appears as an effective density parameter grows: the two formations become minima that coexist over a window of densities and exchange stability within it. We quantify this transition by computing the Orientation Log-Odds Π_OLO as predicted by the model. This paper is a first step towards quantitative models of dyads and of their formation transitions.
ER  -

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