They crisscross back and forth across roads, make sudden turns or stop spontaneously: Pedestrians are the most dynamic element in urban environments. Be it in pedestrian zones, shopping malls, at railway stations or events - it is always a complex task to plan their routes. With VISWALK, PTV now launches a pedestrian simulation tool that is specifically designed to assist railway station operators, city planners, architects and event managers in planning and coordinating their projects. The German software provider with headquarters in Karlsruhe will be presenting VISWALK at the ETC Congress that starts today in Glasgow. What is the ideal platform length? How many elevators do we need? What is the optimum train waiting time which allows travellers to easily get off the train and take their connecting train? All of these are typical issues that planners and operators of railway and underground stations have to deal with. PTV has now developed VISWALK, a simulation tool which allows planners to optimise pedestrian flows in and outside buildings. With VISWALK they can calculate the capacity of railway and underground stations, identify optimal walking routes for the travellers, assess their queuing behaviour at the ticket counters, perform evacuation analyses and analyse the location of shops. During the planning phase it is also possible to use VISWALK in order to optimise the railway station design based on these criteria. At the click of a button the software tool visualises the simulation in 3D.

Focusing on pedestrians

"Pedestrian engineering" is the discipline which focuses on the most prevalent mode of transport, i.e. walking. It aims to improve pedestrian flows both in and outside the building and make them safer. Microsimulation supports this process. VISWALK models pedestrian behaviour like no other simulation software. "One of the special features is dynamic routing," reveals Dr Tobias Kretz, product manager at PTV and a leading expert in pedestrian simulation.

Pedestrians just as vehicle drivers usually try to arrive at their destination as quickly as possible. Often the quickest route is very similar to the shortest route. "However, there are situations where this rule does not apply - the simplest of which is when a large group of pedestrians is doing a u-turn, for example," Kretz adds. "Therefore, VISWALK includes both shortest and quickest path routing in the simulation."

The science behind VISWALK

A kind of collective intelligence is inherent in pedestrian crowds: they automatically form stripes in corridors or create oscillatory flows at bottlenecks. Scientists call this type of dynamics "self-organisation". Both physical and social factors, which can be described by means of the Social Force Model (SFM) developed by Professor Dr. Dirk Helbing, have an impact on the interaction between pedestrians.