Simulating Pedestrian Movement

This paper discusses the results of an extended pedestrian movement project carried out in the center of Tallinn, Estonia. Having gone through several rounds of in situ studies and software prototyping, we present a synthetic method for modelling data of urban qualities as perceived by individual pedestrians. The proposed method includes capturing the walkability of city elements as a landscape of explicit values. This landscape is turned into proximity fields that in turn are fed into an agent-based model for simulating the route selection mechanism of individual pedestrians. The described model is used to demonstrate how each simulated pedestrian is influenced by the perceived qualities of urban environment. Based on our observations and computational modelling experiments, we argue that pedestrian traffic in the city can be successfully simulated with agent-based models. Furthermore, such simulation models, when finely calibrated in the field observations, allow urban planners, city authorities and decision makers to evaluate the impact of future urban design scenarios to pedestrian flows in the city.