Generalized collision-free velocity model for pedestrian dynamics

TL;DR

This paper extends a simple pedestrian model by incorporating wall influences, elliptical distance measures, and smoother direction changes, resulting in more realistic simulations of pedestrian movement and flow in various scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a generalized collision-free velocity model that accounts for walls, uses velocity-based ellipses for distance calculations, and improves pedestrian direction smoothness.

Findings

Enhanced model better simulates pedestrian flow in bottlenecks.

Inclusion of walls and elliptical distances improves realism.

Simulation results align with empirical pedestrian flow data.

Abstract

The collision-free velocity model is a microscopic pedestrian model, which despite its simplicity, reproduces fairly well several self-organization phenomena in pedestrian dynamics. The model consists of two components: a direction sub-model that combines individual desired moving direction and neighbor's influence to imitate the process of navigating in a two-dimensional space, and an intrinsically collision-free speed sub-model which controls the speed of the agents with respect to the distance to their neighbors. In this paper we generalize the collision-free velocity model by introducing the influence of walls and extending the distance calculations to velocity-based ellipses. Besides, we introduce enhancements to the direction sub-module that smooth the direction changes of pedestrians in the simulation; a shortcoming that was not visible in the original model due to the symmetry of the circular shapes. Moreover, the introduced improvements mitigate backward movements, leading to a more realistic distribution of pedestrians especially in bottleneck scenarios. We study by simulation the effects of the pedestrian's shape by comparing the fundamental diagram in narrow and wide corridors. Furthermore, we validate our generalized approach by investigating the flow through bottlenecks with varying exit's widths.