A Checklist for the Evaluation of Pedestrian Simulation Software Functionalities

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive checklist for evaluating pedestrian simulation software functionalities to ensure accuracy and support professional decision-making in designing pedestrian facilities.

Contribution

The authors developed a detailed, ready-to-use checklist for the quantitative assessment of pedestrian simulation tools, promoting standardization and objective certification criteria.

Findings

The checklist covers all critical functionalities for accurate pedestrian flow simulation.

It encourages professional and objective evaluation of simulation software.

Supports the development of standards for pedestrian simulation software certification.

Abstract

The employment of micro-simulation (agent-based) tools in the phase of design of public and private spaces and facilities and for the definition of transport schemes that impact on pedestrian flows, thanks to their achieved accuracy and predictive capacity, has become a consolidated practice. These instruments provide support to the organization of spaces, services and facilities and to the definition of management procedures for normal and emergency situations. The employment of these tools is effective for various but not for all the contexts, nevertheless new features and functions are under constant development and new products are often launched on the market. Therefore, there is a higher necessity of a standard criteria both for the evaluation of the kinds of function that these software provide, at use of practitioners and end-users, and for the definition of software requirements as a reference for the developers that aim at being competitive on this market. On the basis of our experience as pedestrian modellers and as researchers in the crowd modelling area, we designed a comprehensive and detailed ready-to-use checklist for the quantitative evaluation of Pedestrian Simulation Software functionalities that aims at capturing all the aspects that we claim that are useful to undertake a professional study. These functions in our opinion are necessary to provide accurate results in the planning of new facilities or schemes that involve pedestrian activities. With this work we propose a set of criteria of evaluation for these products also to encourage a debate for the definition of objective standards for pedestrian simulation software certification.