Pedestrian Dynamics

Nowadays, due to population growth and urbanization, investigating pedestrian traffic in public areas has become an important and interdisciplinary scientific issue. This field of science, called pedestrian dynamics, attempts to identify important factors in pedestrian dynamics by conducting controlled experiments and theoretical modeling and then tuning the identified factors to increase the safety and quality of roads and public places. In this research, we use the social forces model, which is one of the important theoretical models in the field of pedestrian dynamics, to investigate the evacuation of people from a closed environment [1]. In this model, the walking tendencies and behavior of people are described in the form of several effective forces between people and obstacles, and then Newton's laws are applied to investigate pedestrian dynamics. Here, we employ the social forces model to address the effect of the shape of the environment, the initial distribution of people, and the arrangement of obstacles in representative measures including evacuation time and rate. Moreover, to increase the validity of the results, we optimize the parameters of the social forces model using the Simulated Annealing algorithm and some reliable reference experimental results.

[1] Helbing, Dirk, and Peter Molnar. "Social force model for pedestrian dynamics." Physical Review E 51.5 (1995): 4282.