Evaluations of Legion Studio in Performing Pedestrian Simulation

Abstract

In contrast to the study of vehicular movement which has already obtained considerable significant results due to years of substantial researches, the study of pedestrian movement is a relatively new topic, therefore deserving innovative efforts and attention. As to the domain of pedestrian study, there are two mainstream methods widely approached: the computer simulation method and the analytical method. Through thorough analyses, this thesis has adopted the former, with one of the notable rationales behind this adoption that pedestrian movement inevitably involves complicated stochastic elements. It is because of the complex and autonomous nature of the pedestrian?s characteristics that few software packages in the current market could afford satisfactory emulation of pedestrian movement. Based upon the comprehensive comparison on the contemporary software packages dominant in the current market, Legion Studio is deemed to overcome the major weaknesses embedded within its counterparts, besides its realistic data collected from large volume of experiments, so it is both interesting and worthwhile to investigate its true powerfulness and what its striking characteristics and functionalities are. Upon the selection of Legion Studio as the evaluation object, next concern comes into the context for this assessment. It is in a highly populated public place such as a metro station that pedestrians? demand for service usually substantially exceeds the station?s facilities? supply for usage, thereby resulting in serious congestion problems. Since those problems are a recipe for potential hazards, study for pedestrian movement in heavy traffic conditions where the metro station during the peak hours is a typical example deserves in-depth investigations for crowd-induced safety concerns. Therefore, this thesis intends to evaluate Legion Studio?s modelling capabilities in performing pedestrian simulation within the context of a metro station. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, this evaluation study is about to be conducted under the instructions of an established evaluation framework. To be specific, four kinds of simulation tasks are initially set up to be defined as the evaluation scope where each simulation task specifies Legion Studio to simulate one specific kind of pedestrian activity. Within that scope, each simulation task is endowed with a set of criteria to test the software?s modelling capabilities from various aspects. Based upon the comparisons between the established criteria and the software?s responses, the author would bestow his comments on its modelling capabilities in the form of one particular rating level: Excellent, Above average, Average, Below average and Poor. Furthermore, according to the sequential process of boarding the train or leavening the station, those four alleged simulation tasks amount to a) queuing activity in front of a gate-line, b) waiting activity on a platform, c) transmission activity via a staircase or escalator, and d) transmission activity via an elevator, where the occurrence place accommodating its specific activity is the crowd-prone venue in the context of a metro station. Based upon the ultimate evaluation results by going through the four kinds of simulation tasks? criteria, conclusions will be drawn that whether it is suitable or not for the application of Legion Studio in the study of pedestrian movement to be extended from a metro station into more grand fields, for example, airports, sports stadium, plazas and other crowded public space.