The Development of Pedestrian Gap Acceptance and Midblock Pedestrian Road Crossing Behavior ...
While there are several published studies for modelling pedestrian behavior at signalized crossing in SUMO, the behavior of pedestrians crossing the road at a location other than a designated crossing has not been considered to date. This work looks at how to represent pedestrian agents selecting to cross at arbitrary locations along the length of a road. The pedestrian agents utilize a gap acceptance model that represents how a pedestrian decides when to cross a road, based on the frequency and speed of approaching vehicles, while considering the spacing between them. Furthermore, the gap acceptance model allows the pedestrians to choose to cross all lanes in one go, when safe to do so. This behavior is known as Double Gap or one stage crossing. Alternatively, if an agent is identified as a risk-taker, they may choose to cross lane by lane, sometimes waiting in the middle of the road, known as rolling gap or risk-taker crossing behavior. Including these two crossing behaviors allows us to consider the urgency of the agent and therefore consider situations where urgency may play a factor such as in emergency conditions, rush hour situation and crowd management after an event. The outlined pedestrian crossing model links the pedestrian model EXODUS with SUMO, via the TraCI API.