Abstract
The need for an autonomous agent approach for the modeling of pedestrians in urban environments is discussed, and PEDFLOW is placed in the context of existing models. PEDFLOW is a microscopic model of pedestrians’ movement; each pedestrian is represented as an agent capable of making its own decisions on the basis of a part of the observable scene local to that pedestrian. The model, implemented in Java, provides a framework in which agents are visualized as squares in a grid and movement is modeled as a change of grid position with a delay that characterizes the speed of the agent. A single rule set that is made specific to each agent by the incorporation of parameters characterizing types of pedestrians is used. The rules originate from computer-aided analysis of video footage and are transformed into a form that can be efficiently processed by the agent. By adding tools to extract measures of pedestrian flow, the PEDFLOW model will be made useful to urban planners to evaluate infrastructural changes intended to promote walking in the urban environment.
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