A Rule of Updating Position in Microscopic Pedestrian Model

The rule of updating pedestrian position in a microscopic pedestrian model is substituted by a proposed new rule. In the new rule, the step size of a pedestrian moving in a selected direction at each update is in inverse proportion to repulsive actions imposed by other ones in the direction at an exponential rate, and also pedestrian positions are updated at each very small time interval. In this way, "a barrier" between pedestrians can be generated, and after update their position, they do not overlap each other. The modified model is compared with the original model through simulating the evacuation process of pedestrians in a closed area. Simulation results indicate that the modified model can be used to formulate the degree of pedestrian overlapping in crowd through adjusting model parameters, and the distributions of distances between each pedestrian and the one closest to him or her, obtained by either the original model or the modified model, can be fitted by the t location-scale distribution.