Heterogeneous Pedestrian Simulation in Commercial Complexes: When Attractive Potential Meets Social Force

Commercial complex is a compositional scenario that involves pedestrians with different travel purposes such as commuting, shopping and business. Simulation of pedestrian behavior in a commercial complex is difficult due to the heterogeneity of pedestrians and different attractions from various kinds of shops. Inspired from the law of universal gravitation and the pedestrian dynamics theory, we propose an attractive potential based social force framework for pedestrian simulation in commercial complexes. Our framework consists of an attractive potential model and an attractive potential based social force model. The former model evaluates the attractive force of different types of shops towards heterogeneous pedestrians, by associating the attributes of pedestrians with the types of shops. The latter model effectively evaluates the travel direction of pedestrians by incorporating the attractive force with the social force model via a synthesis force criterion. We conduct the simulation experiment based on 600 groups of pedestrian tracking data collected in the China World Mall, Beijing, a typical commercial complex. The simulation results show that the model can effectively simulate not only the trajectory of real pedestrians, but also the behavior of entering shops. Our research significantly improves the authenticity of pedestrian simulation and provides support for travel behavior modeling of heterogeneous pedestrians in the commercial complex.