Modeling and Development of an Autonomous Pedestrian Agent — As a Simulation Tool for Crowd Analysis for Spatial Design

Abstract

At present, it is expected that pedestrian agent simulation will be applied to not only accident analysis, but also spatial design; ASPF (Agent-based Simulator of Pedestrian Flows) has already been developed as a simulator for such purposes. However, in the present version ASPFver.3 a pedestrian agent merely walks straight ahead and simply avoids other agents, and it had been impossible to analyze crowd flows on a large-scale space with a complicated shape, a function is required that enables an agent to walk along a chain of visible target ‘waypoints’ to each destination, as well as a function the agent keeps the direction to the target. The study introduces newly a target maintaining (Helmsman) function, a concept of waypoint, and update mechanism of targets, and develops the simulator ASP-Fver4.0 that models an autonomous pedestrian agent on ArtiSoc(KKMAS). The performances tests of these additional functions of ASPF ver 4.0 are shown. Especially, to successfully model pedestrians’ shop-around behavior in a Patio-style shopping mall at Asunal Kanayama, Nagoya, ASPF ver 4.1 has been also developed by introducing an optimization function of routes by Dijkstra method, and implemented several parameters based on data for survey of the pedestrians’ behaviors in this mall. Through the test of four simulation cases; (1) weekday case, (2) weekday double case, (3) holiday case, and (4) at time of a music event in holiday case, the performance of ASPFver4.1 was also verified. Due to a series of these version-ups, we can conclude that ASPF is now available for analyzing crowd flows and density in space with complicated shapes.