How to make people pass each other with Astar?

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question

Patrick Cloutier asked Jul 16, '18 Ben Wilson edited Jan 22, '19

How to make people pass each other with Astar?

I have a hospital people flow model where I have thousands of people walking the corridors. Some walk slower than others. The goal is to measure the occupation of each corridor during the day.

The problem is that faster people get stuck behind slower ones even if they have plenty of opportunity to change lanes. See picture. It's not very realistic because it inflates the number of people in the corridors. I tried with long and short Preferred Paths and without Preferred Paths and the same occurs in all 3 cases.

I tried removing Collision Avoidance and it works but again its not very realistic because it deflates the number of people in the corridors. Some blockage should be expected some times. Zero blockage is unrealistic.

Is there something else I could do? Could I make faster ones change lane when stuck behind a slow one?

Or could I make them take a random Preferred path at the beginning of the corridor (or a round robin path) so that they would be distributed on all 'virtual lanes'?

Thanks a lot,

Software Version:

FlexSim 18.1.2

passing astart

people-dont-pass-even-if-they-could.jpg (198.1 KiB)

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Patrick Cloutier commented · Jul 16, 2018 at 02:43 PM

One thing that could help is if there was some explanation in the manual as to how Preferred Path work.

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Answer 1 · 2018-07-16T20:46:58Z

Joshua S answered Jul 16, '18 Ben Wilson edited Jan 22, '19

Preferred paths have a weight attribute that designates how much pull they have on an object. There isn't a way to "push" a person to one path or another except on their creation, they could be created closer to the path you want them to be on, then they would be pulled more towards that path. so like in your picture the inner lanes could be the fast lanes and the outer ones could be slower, and on creation they are placed a little closer to the desire path. Right now with A* it doesn't really work to have a person avoid someone in front of them that is following the same path. If they are coming at each other it works, but it doesn't try to recalculate when following behind someone.

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Patrick Cloutier commented · Jul 18, 2018 at 04:21 PM

Thanks Joshua,

I will have to live with that constraint for my current project but I think this is a serious limitation of Astar for people models and that it should be improved. I bet the programming would be complex but for the user interface all we need is a 'Allow passing' check box.

How do I make this request? Do I have to repost it as a suggestion?

Thanks a lot for all your help,

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Joshua S Patrick Cloutier commented · Jul 18, 2018 at 04:54 PM

You can email the developers at [email protected] and you can suggest an idea.

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