Self-Organizing Pedestrian Movement

Abstract

Although pedestrians have individual preferences, aims, and destinations, the dynamics of pedestrian crowds is surprisingly predictable. Pedestrians can move freely only at small pedestrian densities. Otherwise their motion is affected by repulsive interactions with other pedestrians, giving rise to self-organization phenomena. Examples of the resulting patterns of motion are separate lanes of uniform walking direction in crowds of oppositely moving pedestrians or oscillations of the passing direction at bottlenecks. If pedestrians leave footprints on deformable ground (for example, in green spaces such as public parks) this additionally causes attractive interactions which are mediated by modifications of their environment. In such cases, systems of pedestrian trails will evolve over time. The corresponding computer simulations are a valuable tool for developing optimized pedestrian facilities and way systems.

Waiting pedestrians in the social force model

“…However, by modeling the operational behavior of the pedestrians using the SFM, it is possible to qualitatively reproduce a well known emergent phenomenon: the river-like streams of moving pedestrians through a standing crowd reported by Helbing et al [21]. The ability of a model to correctly reproduce the formation of such streams may be important for the accuracy of predictions of macroscopic quantities, such as flow, since the formation of streams may facilitate the passage through a standing crowd in a similar way as dynamical lane formation facilitates bi-directional flow.…”

“…Helbing and Molnár [1,20] and Helbing et al [21] mention, without further analysis, that group formation among pedestrians due to social bonds, and attraction to special places, such as street artists, can be modeled by attractive, often time dependent, forces similar to the repulsive forces used to model the aversion to walking close to walls, but with opposite sign. Such model would, however, as noted by Helbing and Molnár [20], result in behavior similar to that observed at rock concerts, with people struggling to get as close to the stage as possible; a behavior significantly differing from what is usually meant by waiting.…”

An Adaptive Smoothing Method for Traffic State Identification from Incomplete Information

“…Regarding the observed phenomena and simulation approaches we refer the reader to some recent reviews [1,2,3,4]. Presently, scientists are more and more getting interested in detailed empirical studies.…”

“So Go Downtown”: Simulating Pedestrian Movement in Town Centres

“…Our brief survey focuses on approaches that have had a direct influence on STREETS. For a more complete review see Helbing et al (2001). Reviewing the current state of the art suggests that in spite of its importance, this field is under-researched.…”

“…There are a number of possible approaches to simulating and modelling pedestrian movement (Helbing et al, 2001). Most models focus on a specific aspect of pedestrian movement, which can often be distinguished on the basis of geographical scale -from the micro-scale movement of obstacle avoidance, through the meso-scale of individuals planning multi-stop shopping trips, up to the macro-scale of the overall flows of masses of people between places.…”