Towards modeling pedestrian’s invisible trail for simulating crowd movement

Abstract

Crowd modeling and simulation have drawn much attention in recent decades due to the functionality of recurrence of the crowd movement pattern in an efficient way. Much effort has been paid aiming at generating an accurate simulation result with respect to different aspects of crowd movement pattern. A fact has been observed that footprint left in mud or turf significantly affects pedestrian’s decision making and moving trajectory since those footprints help other pedestrians walk comfortably. Inspired by this, we in this paper propose a crowd simulation model aiming to model how the movement of previous pedestrians affects decision making process of the pedestrians coming later. Unlike pedestrians leaving footprint in mud or turf, pedestrians leave no marks on hard surface. We consider each step of pedestrian moving on hard surface as a mutable invisible footprint which further forms a virtual trail. We first build a model to simulate how the invisible footprint forms and evolves on hard surface, upon which an agent-based crowd simulation model is then built to simulate how pedestrian makes trade-off between the invisible trajectory and the shortest path. The proposed model is validated by case studies with two scenarios. The simulation results indicate that we are able to simulate the impact on pedestrian’s decision making by the invisible footprint.