Urban scale pedestrian simulation in Kobe City center

Abstract

We attempted to construct a digital twin of Kobe City center, from the aspect of pedestrian traffic simulation. Policy evaluation was conducted using traffic demand based on mobile phone population statistics provided by NTT DOCOMO, INC., CrowdWalk, an agent-based pedestrian simulator, and manually edited map obtained from Open Street Map to implement pedestrian signals. Background pedestrian population was estimated to be 6509, and 10,000 evacuees are assumed in the Shinko area. All of them are assumed to evacuate into three stations, JR Sannomiya, Hankyu Sannomiya, and Motomachi. The evacuation time was originally simulated to be 25,685 s without any aided policies. As a policy, splitting the evacuation route reduced the evacuation time into 17,780 s which is 69% of the original. In addition, removing signals reduced the time furthermore into 9550 s, 37% in total. Only removing the signal resulted 12,475 s, which is a reduction to 52% of the original.