Modeling Pedestrian Tactical and Operational Decisions Under Risk and Uncertainty: A Two-Layer Model Framework

Pedestrian tactical choices and operational movement in evacuations essentially pertain to decision-making under risk and uncertainty. However, in microscopic evacuation models, this attribute has been greatly overlooked, even lacking a methodology to delineate the related decision characteristics (bounded rationality and risk attitudes), let...

Developing an Integrated Pedestrian Behaviour Model for Office Buildings

As an increasing number of people work in office buildings and new sophisticated sensor technologies become available there is, both, a need and potential, to develop more complex building service controls that increase the energy efficiency of buildings as well as the well-being of employees. The data required for the testing and evaluation of...

How to calibrate a pedestrian simulation model: An investigation into how the choices of scenarios and metrics influence the calibration

This research investigates the question how the choice of scenarios and metrics influences the calibration of pedestrian simulation models. By calibrating a pedestrian model using different combinations of scenarios and metrics and comparing the results it was concluded that it matters what scenarios and metrics are included during the...

Analysis and Modelling of Pedestrian Movement Dynamics at Large-scale Events

To what extent can we model the movements of pedestrians who walk across a large-scale event terrain? This dissertation answers this question by analysing the operational movement dynamics of pedestrians in crowds at several large music and sport events in the Netherlands and extracting the key crowd movement phenomena. A conceptual model and an...

The Many Roles of the Relaxation time Parameter in Force based Models of Pedestrian Dynamics

In force based models of pedestrian traffic, the relaxation time, ?, is related to the time it takes a pedestrian to adapt its motion to its preferences. An example of this is linear acceleration, but ? is also connected to how the agent adjusts to spatial variations in its preferred velocity, and affects evasive maneuvers. These many roles of ?...

Modelling passenger flows in public transport facilities

This thesis describes the developement of a new type of simulation tool for the assessment of designs of public transport facilities (stations, airports) and other public spaces with intensive pedestrian flows. Since the available space for such facilities is increasingly under pressure, the space efficiency and walking comfort is becoming more...