Semiautomated Analysis of Pedestrian Behaviour and Motion for Microsimulation of Transportation Terminals

Pedestrian Microsimulation is used to design and evaluate the circulation of pedestrians in buildings and pedestrian spaces during the design phase so that changes and optimizations can be made. However, models need input data such as walking speeds which reflect the population modelled. Mass amounts of detailed data collection is therefore needed, but current methodologies are either too slow or use expensive equipment and do not consider finer details. A new methodology called Semiautomated Tracking is created for tracking pedestrians from video footage and generating walking speeds based on manually assigned tags. The methodology is verified against manually calculated movement speeds and applied to a multi-factor analysis of a transportation terminal, revealing that Semiautomated Tracking can quickly generate detailed data for more people and with similar results. Differences were also found between the Canadian data and international guidance, highlighting the importance of the methodology and encouraging future efforts for development.