A cellular automata based model for pedestrian and group dynamics: Motivations and first experiments

Abstract

The simulation of pedestrian dynamics is a consolidated area of application for cellular automata based models: successful case studies can be found in the literature and off-the-shelf simulators are commonly employed by end-users, decision makers and consultancy companies. These models represent pedestrians as agents, but the overall system dynamics is determined simplistically: agents uniformly tend to reach the destination without colliding with obstacles and other pedestrians. Aspects like (i) the impact of cultural heterogeneity among individuals and (ii) the effects of the presence of groups and particular relationships among pedestrians are generally neglected or underestimated. This work describes a cellular automata based model, introducing an innovative behavioral model that encapsulates the theory of proxemics and a simplified representation of the influences determined by the presence of groups of pedestrians in the crowd. A simple scenario is reproduced to observe the influences on the pedestrian dynamics determined by the presence of groups in the crowd and to evaluate the implications of some modeling choices. Results are discussed and compared to experimental observations and to data available in the literature. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.