Modeling visitor movement in theme parks

Abstract

Abstract-Realistic modeling of the movement of people in an environment is critical for evaluating the performance of mobile wireless systems such as urban sensing or mobile sensor networks. Existing human movement models are either fully synthetic or rely on traces of actual human movement. There are many situations where we cannot perform an accurate simulation without taking into account what the people are actually doing. For instance, in theme parks, the movement of people is strongly tied to the locations of the attractions and is synchronized with major external events. For these situations, we need to develop scenario specific models.In this paper, we present a model of the movement of visitors in a theme park. The nondeterministic behavior of the human walking pattern is combined with the deterministic behavior of attractions in the theme park. The attractions are divided into groups of rides, restaurants and live shows. The time spent by visitors at different attractions is calculated using specialized queuing-theoretic models. We compare the realism of the model by comparing its simulations to the statistics of the theme parks and to real-world GPS traces of visitor movement. We found that our model provides a better match to the real-world data compared to current state-of-the-art movement models.

Optimizing event coverage in theme parks

“…We have developed the human mobility model [48] specifically to describe the movements of the visitors in theme parks. We start by generating fractal points representing the visiting points of the human walkers.…”

“…The algorithm for deciding the next destination [48] chooses the next target from the set of unvisited locations based on probabilities which favor the closer locations and locations which correspond to more popular attractions. Visitors try to minimize the Euclidean distances traveled between popular attractions and visiting points.…”

“…We generated two different datasets of visitor movement based on the theme park mobility model (TP) [48], and the SLAW movement model [24]. Each dataset contains trajectory files for 10 hours of mobility with a 10 seconds sampling time.…”

Theme park mobility in disaster scenarios

“…The theme park mobility model (TP) [3] and self-similar least action human walk model (SLAW) [6] are used as realistic mobility models for theme parks. Random waypoint (RWP) is used as a generic model since it is the most commonly used mobility model in the network simulations.…”

“…Therefore, we modeled visitor movements in theme parks in [3] to represent daily routine mobility of theme park visitors without any consideration of the disaster scenarios. However, in our model [3] and the other currently used theme park mobility models, the movement decisions of the visitors are based on visiting the attractions and exploring the park. Considering a disaster scenario, the movement decisions should be based on the security of visitors.…”