Developing a Model for Analyzing Pedestrian Flow in Small Scale Airport Terminal Building

According to the common belief, pedestrian behavior is as 'complex' or 'irregular' as to predict easily. Pedestrians have individual requests, routes, preferences, and goals most of which are determined by the experiences. Moreover, those experiences influence the reaction towards certain physical environments in order to develop and choose the best behavioral preference (s). The effect of predicting and modeling pedestrian movement on architectural design has been argued and gaining importance among today's architectural environment particularly for complex buildings and conditions. Due to the rapidly changing technology and human needs, traditional pedestrian modeling methods including based modeling and micro simulation which demonstrate the pedestrian flow have been becoming insufficient. Therefore, more user-sensitive modeling methods are needed particularly to evaluate and analyze the pedestrian movement. Many models such as Markovian Model, Constructral Theory, Crowds Models have been accepted as efficient model approaches to develop pedestrian flow dynamic models. Analysis and simulation techniques of pedestrian flow characteristics comprise the base in order to develop pedestrian movement simulation. A field study related to collecting pedestrian characteristics and behavior data was conducted in Adana Airport. This building was established in 1956 and used for a limited number of flights for a long time until its privatization. Following the privatization period, both the flight and passenger numbers have considerably increased in this airport. This paper mainly concerns on the future demands of customers which will be affected by the rapidly increasing trend of passenger and flight numbers, as well as changing needs due to physical and emotional conditions of users. As a result, the increasing pedestrian traffic will raise the issue on design and construction, as well as post-occupancy evaluation of the terminal building. A crowd-density prediction was developed for the future functioning of the terminal building particularly for domestic flights. The records were mainly taken by camera, and analyzed through statistical methods in order to understand and evaluate pedestrian flows. A model which is named as ?Semi-major Axis for Pedestrian Ellipse? was developed to analyze design parameters of the existing terminal building due to the passenger movement. In specific, the research results reveal that the pedestrian flow-density relation model is a quadratic equation model for the transport axis within the airport terminal building particularly for the corridors. Parameters of a social force model were acquired all of which based on the developed model. Range of semi-major axis for pedestrian ellipse in social force model was ascertained as well.