Pedestrian dynamics at transit stations: an integrated pedestrian flow modeling approach

This paper presents an integrated modelling framework to capture pedestrian walking behaviour in congested and uncongested conditions. The framework is built using a combination of concepts from the Social Force model (basic one-to-one interaction), behavioural heuristics (physiological and cognitive constraints), and materials science (multi-body potential concept). The approach is ultimately designed to capture pedestrian interactions in transit stations. Due to the lack of available trajectory data of pedestrians within transit stations, the model is calibrated using pedestrian trajectory data from narrow bottleneck and bidirectional flow experiments provided by the Delft University of Technology. These two scenarios were chosen due to the frequency with which they occur in transit stations. The integrated modelling framework reproduced similar trajectory patterns observed in the experiments which encouraged a transit station simulation in an environment similar to that at the Foggy-Bottom METRO station in Washington, D.C.