Assuring Quality of Pedestrian Behavior Results Derived From Simulation Models Applied to Airport Terminals

Computer simulation is an important tool nowadays in the design and assessment of airport terminals and other transport hubs, reducing costs, speeding up decision-making, and bringing new perspectives on scenarios targeted on either legacy or disruptive technologies. Concepts such as agent-based modelling, floor field cellular automata and social force models support a range of software technologies available in easy-to-use packages, allowing complex pedestrian behavior to be modelled in a variety of situations. On the other hand, old challenges concerning model verification and validation can potentially hamper the benefits associated with pedestrian microsimulation, leading to untrustworthy results depicted through appealing screen animations. This research aims to deliver a systematization of verification and validation procedures in pedestrian simulation models applied to the airport terminal. Acknowledging that this research is not exhaustive, categories of tests are proposed, along with measures for their assessment. Regarding pedestrian traffic diagrams, solutions for data treatment are proposed and tested, including a novel approach to the delineation of the steady-state regime. The proposed methods were tested with experimental data and agent-based modelling simulation data, demonstrating the feasibility of the procedures, along with certain cautions on their usage.