A macroscopic propagation model for bidirectional pedestrian flows on signalized crosswalks

This paper addresses modeling of pedestrian movement on crosswalks and the corresponding optimal traffic light scheduling for one intersection. Based on the bidirectional flow effects, a macroscopic pedestrian traffic model is presented, which bears some similarity to Daganzos cell transmission model. Upon this model, a pedestrian traffic signal control problem is formulated as a mixed logic mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem, which can be converted into a pure MILP problem by replacing those mixed logic constraints with equivalent mixed integer linear constraints. Finally, a case study of the proposed pedestrian model is presented, and numerical simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our real-time pedestrian traffic light scheduling approach. The work can be easily applied to a traffic network with both vehicle and pedestrian flows.