Prediction of pedestrians routes within a built environment in normal conditions

Modelling and prediction of pedestrian routing behaviours within known built environments has recently attracted the attention of researchers across multiple disciplines, owing to the growing demand on urban resources and requirements for efficient use of public facilities. This study presents an investigation into pedestrians' routing behaviours within an indoor environment under normal, non-panic situations. A network-based method using constrained Delaunay triangulation is adopted, and a utility-based model employing dynamic programming is developed. The main contribution of this study is the formulation of an appropriate utility function that allows an effective application of dynamic programming to predict a series of consecutive waypoints within a built environment. The aim is to generate accurate sequence waypoints for the pedestrian walking path using only structural definitions of the environment as defined in a standard CAD format. The simulation results are benchmarked against those from the A* algorithm, and the outcome positively indicates the usefulness of the proposed method in predicting pedestrians' route selection activities. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.