Agent-Based Social Pedestrian Simulation for the Validation of Urban Planning Recommendations

The goal of this project is a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that shape a city with a focus on pedestrian flow. Pedestrian flow reveals the use of space, the capacity and use of transportation and has an impact on the health of people. Movement patterns of pedestrians are a topic in many related fields like transportation planning, computer graphics and sociology. This project augments the simulation of pedestrian decision processes by taking into account the preferences for surrounding factors like additional points of interests and how pedestrians interact along their path with other pedestrians in a social manner. The goal of this project is to analyse urban planning configurations and to give designers and decision makers a tool to measure the amount of people walking and therefore define the health of a society, finding places of social interaction and improving social coherence in neighbourhoods.