Modelling the Evolution of Human Trail Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical model of pedestrian movement to understand how trail systems in urban green spaces evolve, aiming to predict their structure and optimize urban planning.

Contribution

It introduces an active walker model for trail evolution that incorporates pedestrian behavior and environmental feedbacks, extending applications from physical and biological systems.

Findings

Model reproduces large-scale spatial features of real trail systems

Predicts topological structures of urban trail networks

Provides insights for urban green space planning

Abstract

Many human social phenomena, such as cooperation, the growth of settlements, traffic dynamics and pedestrian movement, appear to be accessible to mathematical descriptions that invoke self-organization. Here we develop a model of pedestrian motion to explore the evolution of trails in urban green spaces such as parks. Our aim is to address such questions as what the topological structures of these trail systems are, and whether optimal path systems can be predicted for urban planning. We use an `active walker' model that takes into account pedestrian motion and orientation and the concomitant feedbacks with the surrounding environment. Such models have previously been applied to the study of complex structure formation in physical chemical and biological systems. We find that our model is able to reporduce many of the observed large-scale spatial features of trail systems.