10 research outputs found
Pedestrian Traffic: on the Quickest Path
When a large group of pedestrians moves around a corner, most pedestrians do
not follow the shortest path, which is to stay as close as possible to the
inner wall, but try to minimize the travel time. For this they accept to move
on a longer path with some distance to the corner, to avoid large densities and
by this succeed in maintaining a comparatively high speed. In many models of
pedestrian dynamics the basic rule of motion is often either "move as far as
possible toward the destination" or - reformulated - "of all coordinates
accessible in this time step move to the one with the smallest distance to the
destination". Atop of this rule modifications are placed to make the motion
more realistic. These modifications usually focus on local behavior and neglect
long-ranged effects. Compared to real pedestrians this leads to agents in a
simulation valuing the shortest path a lot better than the quickest. So, in a
situation as the movement of a large crowd around a corner, one needs an
additional element in a model of pedestrian dynamics that makes the agents
deviate from the rule of the shortest path. In this work it is shown, how this
can be achieved by using a flood fill dynamic potential field method, where
during the filling process the value of a field cell is not increased by 1, but
by a larger value, if it is occupied by an agent. This idea may be an obvious
one, however, the tricky part - and therefore in a strict sense the
contribution of this work - is a) to minimize unrealistic artifacts, as naive
flood fill metrics deviate considerably from the Euclidean metric and in this
respect yield large errors, b) do this with limited computational effort, and
c) keep agents' movement at very low densities unaltered