Walking between free will and determinism

摘要

Walking is a fundamental activity of human beings. Any simplernmovement is the result of complex interactions betweenrnthe external environment and the individual cognitive dynamics.rnThe proposed models have mainly considered a deterministicrnpoint of view to describe the choice of the pedestriansrntrajectories and to study the critical congested states. But recentlyrnit has been pointed out the importance of the individualrnfree will in determining both the microscopic pedestrianrnbehavior and the emergent properties of the crowd dynamics.rnIn this paper we discuss a hierarchical model for pedestrianrnmobility whose emergent dynamical properties are determinedrnby the bottom-up and top-down actions among thernmicroscopic-level (free-will level), the mesoscopic level (deterministicrnlevel) andmacroscopic level (cognitive level). Thern"mobbers" have an internal cognitive dynamics, perform bothrnphysical and information based interactions using a visionrnmechanism and are able to compute a cognitive map representationrnof the geometrical space.rnThe model has been implemented in the DISTRIMOBSrnsimulator that is designed to simulate a whole city on a distributedrnarchitecture. The main properties of the model arerndiscussed and some applications are presented.