Generation and use of sparse navigation graphs for microscopic pedestrian simulation models

For the spatial design of buildings as well as for the layout of large event areas, the 9 crowd behaviour of the future users plays a significant role. The designing engineer has to make 10 sure that potentially critical situations, such as high densities in pedestrian crowds, are avoided in 11 order to guarantee the integrity, safety and comfort of the users. To this end, computational 12 pedestrian dynamics simulations have been developed and are increasingly used in practice. 13 However, most of the available simulation systems rely on rather simple pedestrian navigation 14 models, which reflect human behaviour only in a limited manner. This paper contributes to 15 enhancing pedestrian simulation models by extending a microscopic model by a navigation graph 16 layer serving as a basis for different routing algorithms. The paper presents an advanced method 17 for the automated generation of a spatially embedded graph which is on the one hand as sparse as 18 possible and on the other hand detailed enough to be able to serve as a navigation basis. Three 19 different pedestrian types were modelled: pedestrians with good local knowledge, pedestrians with 20 partly local knowledge and those without any local knowledge. The corresponding algorithms are 21 discussed in detail. To illustrate how this approach improves on simulation results, an example 22 scenario is presented to demonstrate the difference between results with and without using a graph 23 as constructed here. Another example shows the application of the extended simulation in a real24 world engineering context. The article concludes with an outlook of further potential application 25 areas for such navigation graphs. 26