Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Models of pedestrian flow stumble because people change their minds

#1
C C Offline
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/m...eir-minds/

EXCERPT: [...In social physics...] Most pedestrian models are reasonably simple. Pedestrians are particles that are driven by some force to go in a direction; they don’t collide with each other because there is a repulsive force between them keeping them apart. [...] However, you can use any number of different physical models to study pedestrian interactions.

Unfortunately, pedestrian models are not very well tested against data. Most experiments involve paying university students to walk along corridors and through doors under highly artificial conditions. In part, this is because it has been very difficult to obtain data from natural settings, where you need to track individual pedestrians as they walk through some area of interest.

[...] From the university data, he obtained a quarter of a million trajectories [...] Corbetta found that for most pedestrians, a fairly simple model was pretty good. It correctly predicted that as pedestrians walked the corridor, their trajectory would not be a straight line. Instead, it was a curve with some fluctuations about an average position. For many pedestrians, the model worked well. What the model failed to predict well were the changes in speed along the direction of the corridor. And one notable failure stood out: people who change their mind, make a U-turn, and return from whence they came. Since most models use a kind of driving force to give pedestrians a destination, the model does not allow them to change their mind....
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Climate change drives change in lifestyles? + Obesity sci's paradigm fatally flawed? C C 1 110 Sep 14, 2021 11:30 PM
Last Post: Syne
  Big oil is hurting. Its plan: flood Africa with plastic (flow of goods, distribution) C C 0 115 Aug 31, 2020 09:31 AM
Last Post: C C
  Sorry, Einstein: Hard workers may make better role models than geniuses C C 3 373 Mar 12, 2020 07:19 PM
Last Post: Zinjanthropos
  OMG, people really are anti-vaxxing their pets (UK) C C 0 179 Sep 6, 2019 12:10 AM
Last Post: C C
  Masculine featured people viewed better at their jobs than those with feminine looks C C 1 331 Dec 10, 2018 09:26 PM
Last Post: Syne
  How people like you spend their time + Food patterns C C 1 377 Dec 7, 2016 07:51 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)