Route Selection and Pedestrian Traffic: Applying an Integrated Modeling Approach to Understanding Movement

Abstract

This paper presents an object-oriented approach that tightly integrates multiple modeling techniques and GIS in order to investigate route selections made by pedestrians in an ancient urban environment. Our applied method allows the integration of agent-based (ABM) and human metabolic models in order to enable different agent types, based on age and sex cohorts, to select street network routes that access different urban structures. The case study we apply our method to is a settlement in Turkey that has a known street network and building structures; however, data on social decisions affecting route selection by pedestrians are missing. Despite the lack of social data, the results provide researchers with a useful and reasonable assessment of past pedestrian traffic volume. Such results can then be used to determine areas of potential archaeological significance and direct further investigations through field excavations or other archaeological techniques. We provide initial fieldwork validation of our simulation results, demonstrating our technique’s utility for addressing realistic research goals.