An Agent-Based Pedestrian and Group Dynamics Model Applied to Experimental and Real-World Scenarios

Abstract

Pedestrian simulation is a consolidated area of application in which agent-based models are often employed; successful case studies are described in the literature and commercial, off-the-shelf simulators are commonly employed by decision makers and consultancy companies. Most state-of-the-art models, however, generally do not consider the explicit representation of pedestrians aggregations (groups) and their implications on the overall system dynamics. This work is aimed at discussing the relevance and significance of this research effort with respect to the need of empirical data about the implication of the presence of groups of pedestrians in different situations (e.g., changing density, spatial configurations of the environment). The article describes an agent-based model encompassing both traditional individual motivations (i.e., tendency to stay away from other pedestrians while moving toward the goal) and a simplified mechanism considering the cohesion effects related to the presence of groups in the crowd. The model is tested in a simple scenario to evaluate the implications of some modeling choices and the presence of groups in the simulated scenario. Moreover, the model is applied in a real-world scenario characterized by the presence of organized groups as an instrument for crowd management. Results are discussed and compared to experimental observations and to data available in the literature.

Adaptive pedestrian behaviour for the preservation of group cohesion

“…These theories must be validated employing field data, acquired by means of experiments and observations of the modelled phenomena, before the models can actually be used for sake of prediction. The scarcity of data specifically characterising the behaviour of pedestrians in the presence of groups hinders this validation activity: for the present work we adopted the choice of validating the model in absence of groups with available data from the literature and exploring the effect of the introduction of groups with mechanisms and parameters that satisfied a (qualitative) face validation (Klügl 2008) against available video footages of groups of pedestrians (Federici et al 2012) and preliminary data from experiments in controlled situations (Vizzari et al 2012).…”

An Argumentation-Based Perspective Over the Social IoT

“…Furthermore, goal-oriented agent-based modeling and simulation were considered already mature enough to take over both academic and industrial practice, and since then have in fact been successfully exploited in the context of smart home security [57], unmanned vehicle governance [58], and surveillance [59], to mention a few. In this respect, it is worth emphasizing that simulation, either agent-based or not, is likely to play a key role in engineering a system adopting the Speaking Objects vision, to ensure that collective behaviours arising by emergence are within certain desired boundaries [60], [61]. There, in fact, the flexibility of the argumentation process, the dynamism intrinsic in the envisioned deployment scenarios, and the autonomy of components in deciding the course of actions to undertake, strongly demands for an iterative development cycle featuring a "simulate-then-tune" loop at each new software release.…”

Towards an integrated approach to crowd analysis and crowd synthesis: A case study and first results

“…The following sections actually represent an unfolding of this kind of conceptual and experimental process. In particular, Section 3 introduces a model for pedestrian and group behaviour representing the evolution of a first approach that was started to face issues raised by an unstructured and non-systematic observation of crowd patterns and movements in a real world scenario 2 described by Vizzari et al (2012). In this line of research, a model encompassing groups as a fundamental element influencing the overall system dynamics was designed and implemented and a metric for the evaluation of group cohesion (and, therefore, also its dispersion) was defined.…”