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Pedestrian behavior is an interesting social phenomenon. Understanding such crowd behavior has many important applications in computer animation, digital entertainment, civil planning, military training, etc. Despite significant research and development efforts, it still remains a challenging task. Thorough understanding of pedestrian behaviors requires true multiple disciplinary scientific research. With the fast development of computational technologies, modeling and simulation has become an important approach to understanding crowd dynamics. This thesis continues this trend and aims to model human-like steering behaviors of pedestrians. While simulation is an attractive approach to understanding crowd dynamics, evaluation, in particular, validation of pedestrian models is very much an open research question. This the- sis also contributes to this area by the development and application of a three-stage validation method. The thesis starts with a comprehensive review of both pedestrian studies from social and psychological research, and existing modeling and simulation techniques. This work provides a theoretical basis to understand pedestrians’ navigational behaviors and thus helps support a computational model for realistic simulation. Based on existing pedestrian studies and observations on pedestrians’ steering behaviors in real life situations, a tri-layered modeling structure of their navigational behavior is proposed, which focuses on modeling the middle layer between the traditional path planning and locomotion layers. This middle layer characterizes some commonly ob- served steering behaviors as steering strategies. A …