Simulating Spatiotemporal Features of Pedestrians-Vehicle Interaction

Concerning the fact that when facing complicated situations, human will react differently, we proposed a modified cellular automaton model based on Jiang-Wu's model [Rui Jiang, Qing-song Wu, Physica A 368(2006): 239] to further study interaction between pedestrians and a vehicle in a long channel during emergency or after a mass event when the vehicle and the pedestrians move along the same direction. Pedestrians are allowed to move with different velocity in our model. Using numerical simulations of the proposed model, we firstly studied in the influence of the preferred time-headway, and found when driven carefully, i.e., with a large preferred time-headway, the vehicle will be affected by even a few pedestrians on the road. While driven aggressively, interesting spatiotemporal features as observed during our daily life were reproduced, such as the oscillation behavior, i.e., a bi-stable state in which the vehicle alternating its velocity between free flowing and congested state, and a congested state of the traffic where the vehicle can only move slowly no matter how fast it wants to drive. Results also indicated that, when in the congested phase, the velocity of the vehicle is only determined by the occupancy of pedestrians on the road.