Modeling and Development of an Autonomous Pedestrian Agent — As a Simulation Tool for Crowd Analysis for Spatial Design

Abstract

At present, it is expected that pedestrian agent simulation will beapplied to not only accident analysis, but also spatial design; ASPF(Agent-based Simulator of Pedestrian Flows) has already been developedas a simulator for such purposes. However, in the present versionASPFver.3 a pedestrian agent merely walks straight ahead and simplyavoids other agents, and it had been impossible to analyze crowdflows on a large-scale space with a complicated shape, a functionis required that enables an agent to walk along a chain of visibletarget 'waypoints' to each destination, as well as a function theagent keeps the direction to the target. The study introduces newlya target maintaining (Helmsman) function, a concept of waypoint,and update mechanism of targets, and develops the simulator ASP-Fver4.0that models an autonomous pedestrian agent on ArtiSoc(KKMAS). Theperformances tests of these additional functions of ASPF ver 4.0are shown. Especially, to successfully model pedestrians’ shop-aroundbehavior in a Patio-style shopping mall at Asunal Kanayama, Nagoya,ASPF ver 4.1 has been also developed by introducing an optimizationfunction of routes by Dijkstra method, and implemented several parametersbased on data for survey of the pedestrians’ behaviors in this mall.Through the test of four simulation cases; (1) weekday case, (2)weekday double case, (3) holiday case, and (4) at time of a musicevent in holiday case, the performance of ASPFver4.1 was also verified.Due to a series of these version-ups, we can conclude that ASPF isnow available for analyzing crowd flows and density in space withcomplicated shapes.