Microscopic Pedestrian Simulations: From Passenger Exchange Times to Regional Evacuation

Pedestrian dynamics play an important role in diverse fields of application such as optimizing traffic logistics, e.g. the optimization of passenger exchange times, or egress planning of buildings, infrastructures and even whole regions. Quantitative predictions of pedestrian dynamics, namely of egress times, is an essential part of optimizing pedestrian flows. To obtain quantitative results simulations must be as realistic as possible. Here, we present a new microscopic pedestrian simulator based on a cellular automaton. It reduces discretization artifacts as typically observed in cellular automaton models to a minimum without loosing their efficiency. It reliably captures typical crowd phenomena and can simulate up to 50000 pedestrians in real time.