Article in Proceedings INPROC-2006-27

BibliographyBitzer, Florian; Dudkowski, Dominique; Haala, Norbert: Investigation of Empirical Pedestrian Traces for Calibrating Microscopic Mobility Models.
In: Möhlenbrink, Wolfgang (ed.); Englmann, Frank (ed.); Friedrich, Markus (ed.); Martin, Ullrich (ed.); Hangleiter, Ulrich (ed.): Proceedings of the International Symposium Networks for Mobility 2006, Stuttgart, Germany.
University of Stuttgart : Collaborative Research Center SFB 627 (Nexus: World Models for Mobile Context-Based Systems).
german.
Stuttgart: Eigenverlag, October 2006.
Article in Proceedings (Conference Paper).
CR-SchemaI.6.0 (Simulation and Modeling General)
Keywordspedestrian; microscopic; simulation; empirical data
Abstract

In the research field of microscopic simulation models for pedestrian mobility substantial pro-gress was achieved in recent years. The ongoing strong growth of computational power to-gether with new approaches founding on cellular automata allows the microscopic simulation of large-scale scenarios like the evacuation of whole soccer stadiums, as self-organization can be initiated by using a relatively simple rule set. Recent developments at the Institute for Road and Transportation Science will now ease the simulation of everyday situations with multiple source-destination relations as they occur e.g. in city centers, airport terminals and public transport interchange points. Regardless of its level of detail, each mobility simulation model is in need of comprehensive empirical data for validation and calibration purposes. Thereby macroscopic mobility models, e.g. traffic assignment models, only need cross sectional data like “vehicles per time seg-ment” for instance. Concerning pedestrian mobility on the large scale, only macroscopic sur-veys like cordon counting in a public transport system or traveler flow counting in an airport terminal have been carried out up to now. However, the empirical data resulting from these surveys is not suitable for calibrating and validating microscopic simulation models for pedes-trian traffic, because they only deliver aggregated traffic flow data. Therefore it was neces-sary to develop a new survey method which allows the noninvasive recording and analysis of pedestrian traces. In collaboration with the Institute of Transport Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) a two-day video survey at the Campus Vaihingen of Universität Stuttgart was carried out. By a network of four wide-angle cameras placed at strategic viewpoints, a central area of the campus of about 20,000 sqm incorporating the commuter railway station and the sur-rounding buildings was recorded at a rate of five frames per second with a spatial resolution of 1024x786 pixels of each camera. In order to analyze the collected imagery of some giga-bytes of raw data, solutions for several challenges had to be found. First, suitable tie and control points for georeferencing of the respective cameras had to be identified. This is re-quired to transform the pedestrians’ trajectories from the respective images to a common reference system. Second, methods for deriving pedestrian trajectories from consecutive frames as well as the distinction between pedestrians’ movements and the movement of all other objects had to be improved. Third, unique tags had to be assigned to the observed pe-destrians to trace them over the whole monitored area while they are tracked by the different cameras. The resulting new and unique data set not only consists of pedestrian traces with decided timestamps at each waypoint, it also includes the resulting source-destination matrix on which the timestamp for each pedestrian allows many kinds of statistical operations, e.g. the computation of the average walking time and standard deviation on different source-destination relations. The availability of these real traces will finally enable extensive and high-quality calibration and validation operations for microscopic simulation models. The dataset may even serve as input information for simulation in the research field of communi-cation networks, in particular, in mobile ad hoc networks. In the near future, the detailed ex-amination of many other problems, such as counter flow, crossing behavior, and path build-ing phenomena based on real microscopic mobility data will become possible.

Contactflorian.bitzer@isv.uni-stuttgart.de
Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems, Distributed Systems
Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Photogrammetrie (ifp)
Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Straßen- und Verkehrswesen, Abteilung Straßenplanung und Straßenbau (ISV/SuS)
Project(s)SFB-627, B3 (University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems, Distributed Systems)
SFB-627, B2 (Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Photogrammetrie (ifp))
SFB-627, C4 (Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Photogrammetrie (ifp))
SFB-627, C1 (Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Photogrammetrie (ifp))
SFB-627, A4 (Universität Stuttgart, Institut für Straßen- und Verkehrswesen, Abteilung Straßenplanung und Straßenbau (ISV/SuS))
Entry dateMay 10, 2006