Block-based floor field model for pedestrian’s walking through corner

• A concept of block division is proposed according to the flow characteristics in different scenarios.
• A calculation method is proposed to obtain an accurate solution of static floor field in CA model.
• Pedestrian flow simulations are implemented in L-type and T-type scenarios with corners.
• This method can well reproduce the moving behavior around corner.
• The evacuation time can be reduced due to full utilization of the scenarios.

Floor field model, characterized by discretization in both time and space, is very popular in pedestrian modeling. In this paper, the pedestrian’s moving behavior of walking through corner is described by a block-based floor field model. In this method, a complicated scenario with corners is divided into different types of blocks, the static floor field of each block is separately calculated, and a boundary rule is incorporated into the model to deal with the connected adjacent blocks. Two typical scenarios, L-type scenario and T-type scenario, are used to investigate the performance of the proposed model. The simulation results showed that the proposed model could well reproduce the empirical pedestrian’s moving behavior through corner, i.e., pedestrian may transfer to the far corner instead of queuing up at the near corner when congestion happens. Pedestrians are more uniformly distributed in the whole evacuation process and the total evacuation time could be reduced due to the full utilization of scenarios for both channel and corner.