An Idea for an Agent-Based Simulation

I don't do agent-based simulations (or any other kind of simulations these days), so this is a suggested research topic for someone who does.

A number of supermarkets and other large stores have instituted one-way lanes, presumably thinking this will improve physical distancing of customers. I just returned from my local Kroger supermarket, where the narrower aisles have been marked one-way, alternating directions, for a few weeks now. The wider aisles remain bidirectional (or multidirectional, the way some people roll). Despite having been fairly clearly marked for weeks, I would say that close to half of all shoppers (possibly more than half) are either unaware of the direction limits or disregard them. Kroger offers a service where you order online, their employees grab and pack the food (using rather large, multilevel rolling carts), and then bring it out to your waiting car. Kroger refers to this as "Pickup" (formerly "Clicklist"). Interestingly, somewhere between 70% and 90% of the employees doing "Pickup" shopping that I encountered today were going the wrong direction on the directional aisles.

My perhaps naive thought is that unidirectional aisles are somewhere between useless and counterproductive, even if people obey the rules. That's based on two observations:

1. the number of people per hour needing stuff from aisle 13 is unaffected by any directional restrictions on the aisle; and
2. obeying the rules means running up extra miles on the cart, as the shopper zips down aisle 12 (which contains nothing he wants) in order to get to the other end, so that he can cruise aisle 13 in the designated direction.

Of course, OR types could mitigate item 2 by solving TSPs on the (partially directional) supermarket network, charitably (and in my case incorrectly) assuming that they knew which aisle held each item on their shopping list (and, for that matter, charitably assuming that they had a shopping list). I doubt any of us do have supermarket TSPs lying around, and that's beyond the skill set of most other people. So we can assume that shoppers arrive with a list, (mostly) pick up all items from the same aisle in one pass through it, and generally visit aisles in a vaguely ordered way (with occasional doubling back).

If I'm right, item 1 means that time spent stationary near other shoppers is not influenced by the one-way rules, and item 2 means that time spent passing shoppers increases (because shoppers have to log extra wasted miles just getting to the correct ends of aisles). So if any of you simulators out there would care to prove my point investigate this, knock yourselves out, and please let me know what you find.

Addendum: I heard an interview with Dr. Samuel Stanley, the current president of Michigan State University, regarding plans for reopening in Fall 2020. During the interview, he mentioned something about creating one-way pedestrian flows on campus. (Good luck with that -- herding undergrads makes herding cats look trivial.) The logic he expressed was that it would reduce face-to-face encounters among pedestrians. Dr. Stanley's academic field is infectious diseases, so presumably he knows whereof he speaks. On the other hand, my impression from various articles and interviews is that droplets emitted by COVID-infected people can linger in the air for a while. So there is a trade-off with one-way routing: an infected person passes fewer people face-to-face, but presumably spreads the virus over a greater area due to longer routes. Has anyone actually studied the trade-off?