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Pedestrian Library

When designing public environments, it is important to assess their capacity and throughput, find pedestrian bottlenecks, and carry out evacuation planning. The AnyLogic Pedestrian Library is a pedestrian simulation and crowd analysis tool that allows users to accurately model, visualize, and analyze how crowd flows behave in a physical environment, and eliminate its possible inefficiencies.

A pedestrian in an AnyLogic model moves according to simulated physical rules. It interacts with the surroundings objects, including walls and escalators, and avoids possible collisions. Users can preassign pedestrians with individual properties, preferences, and states. The library’s toolkit includes flow density map, pedestrian counters, and elements for calculating wait and service times.

For more insights on optimizing public environments with simulation, read our white paper, Multimethod Simulation Modeling for Business Applications. It covers practical applications, including pedestrian flow analysis.

Download the white paper

The Pedestrian Library is useful when simulating pedestrian dynamics in urban landscapes, open events, museums, shopping centers, and transport hubs. At a preliminary project design stage, pedestrian simulation models will help assess the ability of a facility to cope with a planned loading and comply with safety requirements. At an operating facility, the Pedestrian Library capabilities will be instrumental when evaluating capacity, mobility, and accessibility issues. During reconstruction, the crowd management tool will support testing the planned changes and determining the best solution.

The library's application areas include:

  • Shopping center and commercial building design and planning — analyze crowd movements at peak entry and exit times or at partial closures, test customer behavior, determine commercially attractive locations, provide footfall analysis for retail facilities, and test emergency evacuation and response plans.
  • Airport terminal design and planning — optimize passenger movement and processing, baggage handling, queue behavior, and service points operations.
  • Rail and transit terminal planning — manage high-density crowds and schedule-based activities.
  • Urban environment planning — assess flow density in an area, infrastructure layout, and emergency evacuation scenarios.
  • Pedestrians in AnyLogic move according to a social force model. They choose the shortest route, avoid collisions with other objects by analyzing the current environment, and make decisions on further movements.
  • Pedestrians’ behavior is defined by a process flowchart, which is easy to create and understand. In addition to basic blocks for simulating movements in a physical environment, the library contains space markup elements for setting walls, services, attractors, and escalators, to name a few.
  • Pedestrians may be preassigned with individual properties, preferences, and states, like whether they keep social distance, carry hand luggage, have a citizenship, or are ready to make a purchase. This is possible due to the agent-based approach, which is implemented in pedestrian models.
  • The output statistics of the model allow users to assess facility capacity and throughput, count pedestrians in different zones, and measure wait and service times. Pedestrian flow density displayed on a density map.
  • The Pedestrian Library can be seamlessly integrated with Road Traffic and Rail libraries to create models of transport hubs with trains, parking lots, and road infrastructure.
  • AnyLogic supports import of 3D objects stored in X3D and VRML files. Pedestrian models can be animated with 3D assets of people and surrounding objects, such as ATM machines, turnstiles, and metal detectors.
  • AnyLogic capabilities allow users to upload data from CAD drawing files, shapefiles, and database files directly to pedestrian models.