On the modeling of pedestrian motion

A model for the simulation of pedestrian flows and crowd dynamics has been developed. The model is based on a series of forces, such as: will forces (the desire to reach a place at a certain time), pedestrian collision avoidance forces, obstacle/wall avoidance forces; pedestrian contact forces, and obstacle/wall contact forces. Except for the will force, it is assumed that for any given pedestrian these forces are the result of only local (nearest neighbour) situations. The near-neighbour search problem is solved by an efficient incremental Delaunay triangulation that is updated at every timestep. In order to allow for general geometries a so-called background triangulation is used to carry all geographic information. At any given time the location of any given pedestrian is updated on this mesh. The results obtained to date show that the model performs well for standard benchmarks, and allows for typical crowd dynamics, such as lane forming, overtaking, avoidance of obstacles and panic behaviour.