European Council for Modelling and Simulation

Pedestrian simulation is often forgotten or implemented poorly in most high-profile traffic simulators. This is the case of SUMO, where pedestrian models are very simple and not based in real human behaviour, making it impossible to study pedestrian safety with it. With this in mind, the ability to externally control pedestrians in SUMO was explored. Using Unity3D to create an external 3D representation of a running SUMO simulation, we were able to create and control pedestrians through the TraCI API. This also opened the possibility to use virtual reality immersed subjects to participate in the simulation, opening the door to study real pedestrian behaviour to create more elaborate models. It also allowed us to completely offload the pedestrian simulation from SUMO to Unity3D, which was tested with the external implementation of the social forces model, without losing SUMO’s interactions between pedestrians and motorized vehicles.