Local performance measures of pedestrian traffic

Efficient interchange stations, where travelers are changing lines and/or travel modes, are essential for the functionality of the whole public transport system. By studying pedestrian movements, the level of service and effectiveness imposed by the design of the interchange station can be evaluated. We address the problem by microsimulation, where a social force model is used for the phenomenological description of pedestrian interactions. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of measures describing the density, delay, acceleration and discomfort for pedestrian flows. Simulation experiments are performed for the movements in two canonical pedestrian areas, a corridor and a corridor intersection. Clearly, each of the four measures gives a description for how pedestrians impede each other, and hence for the efficiency at the facility. There is, however, different information provided by each measure, and we conclude that they all are well-motivated for quantifying the level of service in a pedestrian flow. We also illustrate the outcome for a railway platform, with two trains arriving in parallel.