Models of Pedestrian Adaptive Behaviour in Hot Outdoor Public Spaces

Abstract

Abstract Current studies of outdoor thermal comfort are limited to calculating thermal indices or interviewing people. The first method does not take into account the way people use this space, whereas the second one is limited to one particular study area. Simulating people’s thermal perception along with their activities in public urban spaces will help architects and city planners to test their concepts and to design smarter and more liveable cities. In this paper, we propose an agent-based modelling approach to simulate people’s adaptive behaviour in space. Two levels of pedestrian behaviour are considered: reactive and proactive, and three types of thermal adaptive behaviour of pedestrians are modelled with single-agent scenarios: speed adaptation, thermal attraction/repulsion and vision-motivated route alternation. An heat stress parameter of the agent is calculated during the simulation, and pedestrian behaviour is analysed in terms of its ability to reduce the accumulated heat stress. This work is the first step towards the human component in urban microclimate simulation systems. We use these simulations to drive the design of real-life experiments, which will help calibrating model parameters, such as the heat-speed response, thermal sensitivity and admissible turning angles.