Vehicle-pedestrian interaction for mixed traffic simulation

Simulation of real-world traffic scenarios is widely needed in virtual environments. Different from many previous works on simulating vehicles or pedestrians separately, our approach aims to capture the realistic process of vehicle–pedestrian interaction for mixed traffic simulation. We model a decision-making process for their interaction based on a gap acceptance judging criterion and then design a novel environmental feedback mechanism for both vehicles’ and pedestrians’ behavior-control models to drive their motions. We demonstrate that our proposed method can soundly model vehicle–pedestrian interaction behaviors in a realistic and efficient manner and is convenient to be plugged into various traffic simulation systems. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.