  Applying assignment methods to compute user-equilibrium route choice is very
common in traffic planning. It is common sense that vehicular traffic arranges
in a user-equilibrium based on generalized costs in which travel time is a
major factor. Surprisingly travel time has not received much attention for the
route choice of pedestrians. In microscopic simulations of pedestrians the
vastly dominating paradigm for the computation of the preferred walking
direction is set into the direction of the (spatially) shortest path. For
situations where pedestrians have travel time as primary determinant for their
walking behavior it would be desirable to also have an assignment method in
pedestrian simulations. To apply existing (road traffic) assignment methods
with simulations of pedestrians one has to reduce the nondenumerably many
possible pedestrian trajectories to a small subset of routes which represent
the main, relevant, and significantly distinguished routing alternatives. All
except one of these routes will mark detours, i.e. not the shortest connection
between origin and destination. The proposed assignment method is intended to
work with common operational models of pedestrian dynamics. These - as
mentioned before - usually send pedestrians into the direction of the spatially
shortest path. Thus, all detouring routes have to be equipped with intermediate
destinations, such that pedestrians can do a detour as a piecewise connection
of segments on which they walk into the direction of the shortest path. One has
then to take care that the transgression from one segment to the following one
no artifacts are introduced into the pedestrian trajectory.
