Waiting zones for realistic modelling of pedestrian dynamics: A case study using two major German railway stations as examples

Waiting pedestrians in the social force model

“…It has been shown that using a dynamic route choice model that to some extent directs the agents closer to a quickest path, rather than the static shortest path, may result in more realistic behavior [12]. Also, the study by Davidich et al [19] indicate that passing pedestrians prefer to walk around a waiting group rather than through it, indicating that dynamic route choice is important. However since there seems to be no consensus in the literature on how such a dynamic route choice model should be constructed we chose to investigate the proposed waiting models in a scenario where it can be assumed that dynamic route choice will have a small effect on the results.…”

“…There exists some reported observations on where people prefer to wait under specific circumstances, such as on railway platforms [27] and in railway stations [19], but these observations are on a higher level of aggregation. Investigating the effect of different models for the choice of the preferred waiting position is an important line of future research.…”

“…Waiting pedestrians is a common feature in almost any normal traffic situation, specially at public transport interchange stations where pedestrians wait in front of information signs, in waiting rooms and at platforms. Accurate modeling of waiting pedestrians is important when using simulation to determine the level of service at a pedestrian facility, since groups of waiting pedestrians may reduce the capacity and create bottlenecks for passing pedestrians as showed by Davidich et al [19]. In their work a spatially discrete model in which a waiting pedestrian is fixed in one cell and do not react to other pedestrians in its neighborhood is applied.…”

Integrating Decentralized Indoor Evacuation with Information Depositories in the Field

“…The area in emergencies can be an office building, a theater, a railway station (e.g., [10,11]), a shopping mall, or an urban region (e.g., [12][13][14]). Research on pedestrian and evacuation can be divided into three streams: (a) the study of pedestrian behavior and crowd dynamics, (b) the development of descriptive models to represent pedestrian dynamics as realistically as possible, and (c) the optimization-based method to determine optimal evacuation plans or design solutions [15].…”

“…Examples of microscopic models are cellular automata models (e.g., [10,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31]), lattice gas models (e.g., [32]), social force models (e.g., [4,11,[33][34][35]), motion planning with velocity obstacles (e.g., [36,37]), agent-based models (e.g., [38][39][40]), game theoretic models (e.g., [41][42][43]), approaches based on experiments with animals (e.g., [44][45][46][47]), and hybrid models (e.g., [48]). Cellular automata models and lattice gas models partition the space into grids or hexagons.…”