Social distancing with the Optimal Steps Model

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Optimal Steps Model to simulate social distancing by introducing new parameters, enabling realistic pedestrian behavior in scenarios like bottlenecks, with rules of thumb for different social distances.

Contribution

It provides new parameter values and practical guidelines for implementing social distancing in the Optimal Steps Model within Vadere, facilitating easier simulation setup.

Findings

New parameters successfully enforce 1.5m and 2.0m social distances.

Rules of thumb enable quick parameter tuning for desired distancing.

Simulations show reduced contact times with new parameters.

Abstract

With the Covid-19 pandemic an urgent need to simulate social distancing arises. The Optimal Steps Model (OSM) is a pedestrian locomotion model that operationalizes an individual's need for personal space. We present new parameter values for personal space in the Optimal Steps Model to simulate social distancing in the pedestrian dynamics simulator Vadere. Our approach is pragmatic. We consider two use cases: in the first we demand that a set social distance must never be violated. In the second the social distance must be kept only on average. For each use case we conduct simulation studies in a typical bottleneck scenario and measure contact times, that is, violations of the social distance rule. We derive rules of thumb for suitable parameter choices in dependency of the desired social distance. We test the rules of thumb for the social distances 1.5m and 2.0m and observe that the new parameter values indeed lead to the desired social distancing. Thus, the rules of thumb will quickly enable Vadere users to conduct their own studies without understanding the intricacies of the OSM implementation and without extensive parameter adjustment.