A new collision avoidance model for pedestrian dynamics

The pedestrians can only avoid collisions passively under the action of forces during simulations using the social force model, which may lead to unnatural behaviors. This paper proposes an optimization-based model for the avoidance of collisions, where the social repulsive force is removed in favor of a search for the quickest path to destination in the pedestrian’s vision field. In this way, the behaviors of pedestrians are governed by changing their desired walking direction and desired speed. By combining the critical factors of pedestrian movement, such as positions of the exit and obstacles and velocities of the neighbors, the choice of desired velocity has been rendered to a discrete optimization problem. Therefore, it is the self-driven force that leads pedestrians to a free path rather than the repulsive force, which means the pedestrians can actively avoid collisions. The new model is verified by comparing with the fundamental diagram and actual data. The simulation results of individual avoidance trajectories and crowd avoidance behaviors demonstrate the reasonability of the proposed model.