Simulation of collision avoidance behavior in crowd movement by data-driven approach
Authors: Xuanwen Liang, Eric Wai Ming Lee
Organizations: Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
Crowd movement simulation is essential for pedestrian safety management and facility layout optimization. Data-driven models enhance trajectory prediction accuracy under Euclidean metrics, yet they suffer from excessively high collision rates, especially in bidirectional and multidirectional flows. In this paper, we establish a novel data-driven crowd simulation model that incorporates the pedestrian collision mechanism into the loss function to reduce collisions. A new lateral-acceleration-based collision loss function and a Voronoi-based motion feature extraction approach are proposed. The model is based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture and is termed CPGAN (Collision-Penalized GAN). We evaluate CPGAN in bidirectional flow scenarios, which involve frequent collision avoidance behaviors. Results show that the proposed lateral-acceleration-based collision loss significantly reduces opposite-direction pedestrian collision rates to levels comparable with controlled experiments. CPGAN effectively simulates bidirectional flow, reproducing lane formation and N-t curves. The research outcomes can provide inspiration for integrating pedestrian dynamics mechanisms into loss functions in data-driven crowd simulation.
Large-scale crowd management requires pedestrian simulations that are both computationally efficient and compatible with feedback-based control. However, most open-source tools are either microscopic or not designed for network-scale closed-loop evaluation. This paper presents PedNStream (Pedestrian Network Flow Simulation), an open-source, Python-native simulator for macroscopic pedestrian network loading based on the Link Transmission Model (LTM). The framework extends LTM-based pedestrian models by incorporating stochastic link dynamics that capture diffusion and activity-induced variability, and replaces dynamic user equilibrium route choice with a utility-based formulation suited to uncertain, intervention-driven settings. PedNStream is implemented as a modular framework with built-in controller interfaces for interventions such as gating, flow separation, and route guidance. We evaluate the framework in a staged manner. Synthetic scenarios verify key mechanisms, including queue formation, spillback, congestion dissipation, and adaptive rerouting. Real-network experiments assess large-scale behavior and consistency with observed pedestrian counts. A closed-loop case study demonstrates controller integration, and a runtime analysis quantifies scalability. These results establish PedNStream as an efficient and practical testbed for large-scale pedestrian network simulation and control.
In real-world applications, pedestrian trajectory prediction models rely on inputs from detection and tracking systems. Prior trajectory prediction benchmarks either contain relatively sparse pedestrian interactions, assume perfect tracking inputs, or rely on overhead viewpoints that minimize occlusion and perspective distortion, limiting evaluation in realistic dense-crowd scenarios. We present CrowdTraj, a benchmark for pedestrian trajectory prediction in natural dense crowd scenes. Unlike previous datasets, CrowdTraj supports end-to-end evaluation from detection through tracking to trajectory prediction under severe occlusion in CCTV views. It also captures diverse, natural pedestrian behaviours, including abrupt directional changes rarely observed in existing benchmarks. CrowdTraj includes five diverse scenes, with an average of 1,146 unique pedestrians per scene, maximum frame-level densities ranging from 114 to 372 pedestrians, and over 3.2 million annotated head bounding boxes. CrowdTraj provides pixel and real-world coordinates via per-scene homography matrices for physically meaningful analysis. Our experimental results show that tracking accuracy (IDF1) drops to 0.68 to 0.70 in the densest scenes, compared with approximately 0.90 in less crowded scenes. Trajectory prediction training also becomes substantially more computationally expensive in dense scenes, with training times increasing by up to 8 times. These findings show that CrowdTraj exposes limitations in current trajectory prediction pipelines that remain hidden on existing sparse-crowd benchmarks, particularly in robustness to tracking noise and computational scalability.
Antonius Bima Murti Wijaya, Paul Henderson, Marwa Mahmoud
Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction in crowded environments remains challenging due to the multimodal uncertainty of human motion and the variable complexity of motion dynamics across different scene contexts. Existing goal-conditioned models rely on static displacement structures that assign equal weight to all historical time steps, standard graph attention mechanisms, and fixed-capacity motion decoders that cannot adapt to local prediction complexity. To address these limitations, we propose TSCA-Net, a trajectory prediction framework built upon three complementary modules. The Temporal-Spatial Clique Attention (TSCA) module introduces learnable temporal gating into clique-based goal-history interaction, enabling time-aware modulation of historical observations relative to each candidate goal. The Cross-Pedestrian Clique Potential (CPCP) module models asymmetric pairwise agent relationships through a dynamic clique potential framework with a time-varying social graph. The Adaptive KAN Grid Refinement (AKGR) mechanism dynamically adjusts the B-spline grid resolution of a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network-augmented LSTM decoder based on per-agent goal distribution entropy, balancing model expressiveness against overfitting across varying motion complexities. Extensive experiments on the ETH/UCY and Stanford Drone Dataset benchmarks demonstrate that TSCA-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, with average ADE/FDE of 0.13/0.20 m on ETH/UCY and 6.95/10.43 pixels on SDD. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of all three proposed modules.
Md Mustafizur Rahman, Guangchao Yang, A F M Abdun Noor +3