On transferability and calibration of pedestrian and car motion models in shared spaces

ABSTRACT

Modelling and simulation of mixed-traffic zones is an essential tool for transportation planners to assess safety, efficiency, and human-friendliness of future urban areas. This paper addresses the calibration and transferability of existing shared space models for pedestrians and cars. Specifically, our first contribution is enhancing the Game-Theoretic Social Force Model (GSFM) by a generic methodology for largely automated model calibration. The second contribution is an investigation into the transferability of shared space models. We define criteria for model transferability and present a case study, in which we evaluate transferability of the model we constructed based on the ``German data set'' to a different shared space environment from China. Our results indicate that although the model faces difficulties replicating road users’ motion from a new environment, by adding social norms (derived through analysis) of that environment to our model, satisfactory improvement of model accuracy can be obtained with little effort.

KEYWORDS:

• Mixed-traffic
• behavior modeling
• multi-agent systems
• shared space
• game-theoretic social force model

Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Research Training Group SocialCars (GRK 1931). The authors thank the participants of the DFG research project MODIS (DFG project #248905318) for providing the HBS data set.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DE) [GRK 1931].