Behavioural model of the pedestrian interaction with road traffic.

In the field of the simulation of pedestrians, the majority of the existing models concern pedestrians in homogeneous situations, i.e. interacting with other pedestrians (situations of corridors, entries/left part, crossings of flow, etc). There exists few programs simulating a behavior of pedestrian in urban environment, and more particularly at the time of crossing the road. The majority of the studies within this framework describe succinctly some normative behaviors of pedestrians, the central point of the articles is often a different subject, such as 3D modeling of the pedestrian, or the general facilities at a crossroad. The problem treated in this article is thus synthesized; a pedestrian must go on the other side of the roadway. The level of safety perceived by the pedestrian results from studies when questioning the pedestrians. Other studies are specified on the influence of the traffic density. By taking again the results of these studies, one can determine at which point the pedestrian can decide to cross. For example he can decide to cross immediately, in diagonal or straight line, or to reach a more distant pedestrian road-marking. Then, about vehicle avoidance, many studies determine the 'gap timing' or the 'gap acceptance', i.e. the evaluation of the margin available to the pedestrian to pass before a vehicle which moves towards him. He can thus decide either to go before or behind a vehicle. The traffic simulation software ARCHISIM, whose driver model results from studies of driving psychology, that have been implemented following a multi-actor point of view, was used. The model of pedestrian, integrated into ARCHISIM was developed, using both homogeneous algorithms of avoidance (between pedestrians), and a model of crossing inspired of the studies in psychology quoted previously, which we will detail more. The validation of the model of crossing is very difficult; for the moment it is validated only at a statistical level, using some other studies of psychologists, for example one gives us percentages of choice of crossing points along a long street. By reproducing this highway type, it is attempted to find the same distribution. As for the vehicles avoidance, it is a question of simulation experiments and of finding the results given by the same already quoted articles. For the covering abstract please see ITRD E135207.