Christian Royer

Dynamic Medium Scale Navigation Using Dynamic Floor Fields

This contribution considers a new method for dynamic medium scale navigation in microscopic pedestrian simulators. The concept of static navigation floor fields is extended to a dynamic interpretation following ideas of (Kretz, T, Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, P03012, 2009) and (Hartmann, D, New Journal of Physics 12(4):043032, 2010) within a cellular automaton approach. Every few simulation steps a new floor field for navigation is constructed by solving the Eikonal equation on the dual grid of the underlying cellular automaton discretization. By considering other pedestrians directly in the construction of the floor field, the realism of the simulations is significantly increased. The new contribution of our work is to additionally consider walking directions of pedestrians. This leads to a significant increase in the realism of simulations.

Waiting Zones for Real Life Scenarios: A Case Study Using a German Railway Station as an Example

Simulations of pedestrian dynamics aim to reproduce and predict the natural behaviour of pedestrians in different situations. In most models it is assumed that pedestrians constantly walk towards their destinations. Here we investigate the legitimacy of this assumption using data, collected during a field experiment and obtained from analysis of video recordings, at a major German railway station. Our observations suggest that a substantial proportion of people stand at certain locations for some time. In order to reproduce the observed behaviour adequately, we enhance an existing cellular automata framework with a new element to model standing persons, the so called waiting zones. Through simulations, we demonstrate how standing persons influence the overall dynamics. We also analyse how the developed model can be used for analysis of critical situations.