Macroscopic Versus Microscopic Pedestrian Study

Traditional pedestrian traffic studies have been done in Macroscopic level:

• Aggregation of pedestrian movements into flow, average speed and area module
• Not suitable for detail design
• Control only using space allocation: Assume that wider space is always needed if the flow of pedestrians increases (to maintain the same level of service).

In contrast, Microscopic pedestrian study has more has more general usage and considers detail design:

• Each pedestrian is treated as an individual agent which occupied a certain space in certain time.
• Consider the interaction between pedestrians
• Well suited for prediction of pedestrian flow performance in pedestrian areas or building with some objects that reduce the effective width of it (e.g. pedestrian areas or buildings with some street furniture such as kiosk, benches, seating, telephones, fountain, etc.).
• Control using time, space and direction.

Back to Pedestrian Research Page, or Microscopic Pedestrian Page

© copy right 2002 by Kardi Teknomo. All right reserved.

Reference: this page is taken from:

Kardi Teknomo, Microscopic Pedestrian Flow Characteristics: Development of an Image Processing Data Collection and Simulation Model, Ph.D. Dissertation, Tohoku University Japan, Sendai, 2002