Modeling Pedestrian Detour Behavior By-Passing Conflict Areas

Abstract

In the process of walking, most pedestrians prefer to choose the shortest path, which requires passing through the conflict area. However, in the case of high crowd density, 5–20% of the total population will choose to follow the pre-planned route before walking or during the initial period of the trip to bypass the conflict area. Aiming at reproducing this detour behavior phenomenon, an extended social force model (SFM) is proposed according to a three-layer pedestrian simulation framework. This model not only fully considers the choice of detour mode, but also contains the avoidance and game behavior at the conflict point. At the strategic layer, a detour mode selection model based on the Logit model is established considering the pedestrian starting time and detour angle, to distinguish between the two groups of pedestrians who follow the pre-planned route and those who repeatedly adjust the route during the trip. Then, the path decision based on visual perception density at the tactical layer and the Voronoi-based SFM at the operational layer are combined to guide the specific movement of the two types of pedestrian groups. A series of evaluation indexes such as the central density, the mean local density, and detour level is selected, and Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K-S) test and dynamic time warping (DTW) method are used to evaluate and compare the scores of each index of different models. The results show that the model can improve the existing pedestrian detour simulation model to a certain extent. In sum, the travel time score, the detour level, and the mean local density score respectively increase from 0.71 to 0.81, 0.46 to 0.81, and 0.39 to 0.48, which indicates a significant improvement in walking performance.