Examining factors of walking disutility for microscopic pedestrian model - A virtual reality approach

Understanding mechanisms of microscopic pedestrian behaviour is important for pedestrian simulation, which is a useful tool for the design of pedestrian infrastructure. Interest in understanding pedestrian walking behaviour is also increasing in the mechanical engineering area to develop personal mobility vehicles that can move together with pedestrians. Like other behaviour in transport contexts, pedestrian behaviour can be modelled by the disutility minimisation principle. The property of a disutility-based model depends on how its disutility is formulated. A point of this issue is that whether pedestrians anticipate the disutility that they will experience in the next few seconds or just think of the instantaneous disutility at each moment to decide how they walk. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the anticipation of disutility is an essential factor in a microscopic pedestrian model. Two approaches were employed for this purpose: a theoretical approach with optimal control theory and numerical calculations, and an experimental approach with a virtual reality (VR) system, in which an actual human walks through a crowd simulated by a pedestrian model. We found two main results. First, a conventional form of the social force model can be derived by instantaneous-disutility-minimisation principle. Second, actual pedestrians seem to anticipate disutility to be experienced in near future (e.g. a few seconds) to decide how to walk. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.