Methods for Modeling and Simulation of Multi-destination Pedestrian Crowds

In this paper we present an overview of the four parts of a research project concerning pedestrian flow modeling. In retrospect, rapid growth in the volume of public transport in the last 20 years has urged efficient planning and optimal construction of public facilities. At the same time, the modeling of transport and pedestrian behaviors has become an important research topic as well. In the study of pedestrian behaviors, whereas evacuation scenarios (in which pedestrians all target a definite destination) and multi-agent systems (in which pedestrians are treated as heterogeneous individuals) have attracted much attention as two specific problems, comparatively little attention has been paid to pedestrian crowd behaviors in situations of multiple destinations. The objective of the present study is to investigate pedestrian behaviors in such a context. Our primary focus is the modeling of intersecting pedestrian streams. To address the problem from a practical perspective, we applied simple but realistic geometric configurations in our study, which could be independently extended, if necessary.