Pedestrian Behavior And Modelling For Commuter Airport Terminals

The SFPE research roadmap have identified that new movement and anthropometric parameters reflective of today's society are essential as proper input parameters into evacuation and pedestrian modelling. Airports, which require the use of evacuation modelling, have not seen many publicly available contemporary studies that any practitioner can draw upon for movement speeds to date. Hence, the study herein aims to collect and analyze people movement and behavioral data for an airport. Moving walkways in the airport tunnel systems are a main feature of the study location, thus the behavior of individuals on these walkways is the primary focus of this study. Movement with and without luggage is collected and examined for 734 persons. The authors examined the recorded videos with manual and innovative kinematic tracking algorithms. Analysis determined people were moving faster in these spaces than traditional movement studies suggest, at a pace of nearly three meters per second inclusive of the tread speed of 0.7 m/s. The subsequent use of pedestrian modelling software for analysis followed. The modeling herein was adapted through a software development kit to adapt to dynamic changes in agent movement behavior depending on barrier and technology features of the airport. Results of the modelling showed consistent overall travel times through the tunnel with the observed times. Modelled travel times gave an average time of 3:59 and 4:20 for those without luggage and those with heavy luggage, respectively. The final presentation and paper will also provide considerations for the difficult to study nature of these structures, involved ethics, and attention to the data's use and function in the future of airports given that these infrastructure types are undergoing critical changes in the next few years in the COVID recovery phase.