Sliding Waypoints: A Novel Pedestrian Navigation Approach for Use with Social Force Models

Social force models are widely used for pedestrian simulation, however many such models were developed primarily with the reproduction of macroscopic metrics in mind, such as flow rates through bottlenecks and the speed-density relationship of the pedestrian fundamental diagram. Thus, they tend to neglect more microscopic aspects, such as the precise trajectories travelled by individual agents. In particular, since most classical social force models were designed primarily with building evacuation scenarios in mind, they tend to not accurately recreate pedestrian behavior in traffic-like situations, for example, overtaking maneuvers. Nevertheless, these classical models are widely used and trusted, so it is advantageous in some use cases to improve upon them without entirely re-inventing them. We therefore present a novel navigation approach for use with social force models, called “sliding waypoints” which replaces the use of static waypoint-based navigation. This approach can be used in conjunction with most pre-existing social force models and can result in the generation of more realistic trajectories. We test this approach with three different models based on how drastically it alters the macroscopic outcome of each model and how well the generated trajectories match trajectories from real-world data in comparison to the pure model in a simple corner-overtaking scenario. We find that given proper calibration, significantly more realistic trajectories can be generated, albeit with a significant, though possibly mitigatable, impact on the resulting speed-density relationship of the pedestrian fundamental diagram.     «

Social force models are widely used for pedestrian simulation, however many such models were developed primarily with the reproduction of macroscopic metrics in mind, such as flow rates through bottlenecks and the speed-density relationship of the pedestrian fundamental diagram. Thus, they tend to neglect more microscopic aspects, such as the precise trajectories travelled by individual agents. In particular, since most classical social force models were designed primarily with building evacuati...     »