Simulation and evaluation of spiral movement of pedestrians: Towards the tawaf simulator

In some social or religious events, pedestrians make spiral movement circulating around the central object. This paper studies the way making a favourable model to reproduce such a movement. The pedestrian motion is modelled by use of Cellular Automata (CA). The model is implemented in square lattice with static floor fields in polar coordinate. In order to obtain realistic behaviour, we have further implemented the floor field associated to the wall avoidance and lane formation. The results are quantitatively analysed to evaluate the circularity of the pedestrian movement by use of the optical flow analysis, one of the image processing techniques. Velocity vector of the brightness patterns in the simulated movies are evaluated by this approach. The results of various simulations and evaluations show that this model adequately reproduces the spiral movement of pedestrians.