In design of evacuation plans for major metropolises, it should be recognized that a potentially largenumber of evacuees depend either on transit or other modes for evacuation, or need to walk over a distanceto access their cars. In the process of approaching some designated pick-up points or intermediatedestinations, the massive number of pedestrians may incur tremendous burden to vehicles in the roadwaynetwork. Hence, development of a simulation tool, capable of replicating the realistic road condition forboth the pedestrian and vehicle flows under the chaotic situation, is an imperative task. Such a simulationtool should be able to account for individual behaviors as well as all kinds of interactions, includingconflicts between pedestrians, between vehicles, and between pedestrians and vehicles. Despite theincreasing use of traffic simulation as the primary analysis tool, effective mechanisms to simulate themixed vehicle-pedestrian flows under congested environments remains at its infancy. In this study, weattempt to address this vital subject with the Mixed-Cellular Automata (MCA) method. Our proposedsimulation model has integrated the strengths of the CA method with some probabilistic functions, offeringa realistic mechanism to reflect the competing and conflict interactions between vehicle and pedestrianflows. Although the development remains at its preliminary stage, our experimental results clearly indicatethat failing to account for the impact of mixed flow interactions in a congested traffic system could resultin far underestimate of the delay, travel time, and system throughput.
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