Modelling the Pedestrian’s Perception for the Social Force Model to Reproduce Experimental Data

The social force model which belongs to the microscopic pedestrian studies has been considered as the supreme model by many researchers and engineers due to the main feature of its capability in reproducing the self-organization phenomena resulting from pedestrian dynamics. Recently, some principles of this model have been modified by other researchers to overcome a shortcoming that the model could not reproduce experimental data in normal situations such as the fundamental diagram. In this article, we argue that these principles are not the reasons for this shortcoming. And we clarify that the actual reason for this shortcoming is due mainly to the misunderstanding of the role of the pedestrian’s perception of the objects surrounding him. And then, we present a typical approach to find the relation between the pedestrian’s perception and the local density which helps in reproducing the fundamental diagram which conforms to the empirical data while conserving the principles of the social force model.