Realistic navigational behavior for pedestrians (part II)

• Main Author: Cho, Benjamin Eng Keong.
• Other Authors: Zhou Suiping
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computer applications::Social and behavioral sciences; DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Simulation and modeling
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/39718
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

It is a challenge to simulate realistic navigational behavior for pedestrians. Over the years, much research has been done in the area of pedestrian movement simulation. However, most of these models failed to include the psychological factors in humans. This is definitely necessary in order to make the pedestrians move more realistically. This report discusses on how we implement an agent-based pedestrian simulation model with the integration of psychological factors. Some of these factors are the pedestrian’s personality, urgency and personal space. In our system design, the pedestrian possesses vision and prediction to assess the spatial information. With this information, the pedestrian would then make decisions on what navigational path to take, and adopt appropriate actions. Additionally, cognitive capabilities of pedestrians, such as attention range and working memory, have been included in our system design. All these features help to make the simulation model appear more realistic. Through the results of the simulations, it is proven that our system design is effective in demonstrating realistic navigational behavior for pedestrians. This simulation effectively shows some basic navigational behavior (following, overtaking, and avoiding) for various agent types under different scenarios. It clearly demonstrates how different people react given the same scenario. The simulation results are promising and worth considering for future work.