Emergent fundamental pedestrian flows from cellular automata microsimulation

In recent years cellular automats (CA) have been successfully applied to modeling traffic how. Use of a CA for modeling pedestrian flows is examined here. A particle hopping model for a single-direction al pedestrian flow over a multilane walkway is presented. This model offers the advantage of effectively capturing the behaviors of pedestrians at the micro-level while attaining realistic macro-level activity. The emergent group behavior is an outgrowth of the interaction of the rule set in simulation. The results indicate that a heuristically derived minimal rule set produces Row patterns that closely resemble the accepted fundamental diagrams. Important parameters for determining the shape of the fundamental diagrams are examined. Key rules used in a vehicular traffic CA are tested for their applicability to the pedestrian CA model.