4. Summary, Conclusions, Discussion, and Outlook
In this contribution we have summarized the difficulties in simulations of pedestrians to guide pedestrians on –
under global perspective – detours without introducing artifacts into their trajectories. We have then sketched the basic
elements for a solution which makes use of intermediate destination areas of certain shape at certain location.
The proposed scheme then was applied with an example scenario. It could be demonstrated that even with a very
simple assignment method (Equation 1) it is possible to find a travel-time-based equilibrium for the route choice ratios
and that the resulting average travel times as well as the evacuation times were significantly smaller for the equilibrium
case.
These results in a further step were compared to a simulation with a one-shot assignment approach. In Figure 11
and also in Table 1 it can be seen that the one-shot approach yields the largest overall efficiency in pedestrian behavior.
It may well be that this is even more realistic than the approach with explicit intermediate destination (although this
remains to be shown empirically). The drawback of the one-shot assignment is, however, as already stated that the
route choice ratios are not an explicit result of the method. In a multi-origin and multi-destination scenario they might
be difficult to be restored from the data and they might be exactly what a planner desires to have to determine for
example the emergency routing in a large and complex infrastructure. It is too early to say how the two methods relate.
Particularly as so far they have not been compared in more complex scenarios.