Modeling tagged pedestrian motion: a mean-field type game approach

Abstract

This paper suggests a model for the motion of tagged pedestrians: pedestrians moving towards a specified targeted destination, which they are forced to reach. It aims to be a decision-making tool for the positioning of fire fighters, security personnel, and other services in a pedestrian environment. Taking interaction with the surrounding crowd into account leads to a differential nonzero-sum game model where the tagged pedestrians compete with the surrounding crowd of ordinary pedestrians. When deciding how to act, pedestrians consider crowd distribution-dependent effects, like congestion and crowd aversion. Including such effects in the parameters of the game, makes it a mean-field type game. The equilibrium control is characterized, and special cases are discussed. Behavior in the model is studied by numerical simulations.