Field Theory of Pedestrian Flow

Abstract:

Compared to the vehicles’movements, the pedestrians’ are more flexible and exhibit high intelligence. In general, in order to achieve the best moving performance, a pedestrian moves based on a full evaluation of one’s surrounding environment and the prediction of the environment evolution. How to quantitatively describe pedestrians’ intelligence is one of the emphasis and difficulties in the field of pedestrian study. A pedestrian framework is proposed by introducing the concept of field. Through translating pedestrians’ active intelligence into the passive strength imposed at their location by presumed pedestrian fields, pedestrians’ intelligence can be mathematically modeled. Results indicate that many practical pedestrian phenomena such as oscillation of pedestrian flow near an outlet, pedestrian automatic lane formation, separation of pedestrians due to implicit right side moving can be reproduced quite well in computer simulations.