Integrating lateral swaying of pedestrians into simulations

Traditionally, pedestrian simulations are a standard tool in public space design, crowd management, and evacuation management. In particular, when minimizing evacuation times or identifiying hazardous locations, it is of vital importance that simulations are as accurate and realistic as possible. Although today's pedestrian simulation models give satisfying results in many cases, they are not realistic in highly crowded scenes. In this paper, we describe a characteristic motion pattern that is commonly observed in areas of high pedestrian density and that has not been taken into account in state-of-the-art pedestrian models. Hence, we extend an existing pedestrian model by integrating this characteristic motion pattern and show that our proposed model gives more realistic trajectories.