Fluctuations in pedestrian dynamics routing choices*

A quantitative understanding of pedestrians choice processes and their macroscale

reflections represents a major challenge, with immediate societal impact,

for example in helping increasing safety and comfort in relation to urban design

and planning of small and large scale events.

So far, a systematic modeling of the fundamental mechanisms for how macroscopic

flow patterns emerge from microscopic routing decisions has remained elusive

due to the technical challenge associated to the collection of

accurate and unbiased experimental data of pedestrian dynamics.

In this work we analyse the role of fluctuations, related to pedestrians individual variability,

in the emergent behaviors observed in crowd flows subject to binary path choices.

We base our analysis on trajectories of pedestrians collected

during extensive real-life tracking campaigns using depth cameras images.

We make use of a combination of a herding process with a variational principle,

showing that individual fluctuations induce sub-optimal flow partitioning

even in relatively simple geometries.