2025 , Volume 30, № 3, p.23-36

Purpose. The article investigates the space occupied by a person (personal space) under moving in various scenarios: normal and competitive movement, movement in a straight corridor both with and without bottleneck.

Methodology. An open access data archive with a series of well-controlled laboratory experiments was used. These data include people’s coordinates during movement, which provides high accuracy of the observations. Four experiments with a large number of participants were selected for the study. A Voronoi diagram was constructed on each frame. The people’s coordinates in the frame were used as the set of seeds for the Voronoi diagram. It is assumed that the area of the Voronoi cell corresponds to the area of the personal space.

Findings. Time series and histograms of the Voronoi cell area were constructed for the all considered experiments. The average personal space during movement ranges from 0.12 to 0.125 m2 in bottleneck scenarios under competitive conditions, slightly exceeding the average body size of 0.1 m2. During competitive movement, people can move in relatively limited conditions. Personal space can be momentarily reduced to 0.05 m2 during movement, this value does not have longterm stability. The compressive forces that a person encounters in a crowd manifest themselves in waves. Compression can occur not only in front of the opening, but also at a distance from it. When moving in a straight corridor with an opening under normal conditions, people retain a space around themselves estimated at 0.23 m2 on average. Under the same conditions in a straight corridor without an opening, the size of the dynamic space increases to 0.4 m2. It has been shown that transient modes require more space for movement compared to steady-state ones.

Originality/value. The findings of this research contribute to enhancing computer simulations of people movement and assessing the precision of calculations in different scenarios.