VELOS : a VR platform for ship-evacuation analysis

Virtual Environment for Life On Ships (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This article focuses on presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: (i) capability of multiple users’ immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, (ii) real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment events and crowd-behavior parameters, (iii) capability of agents and avatars to move continuously on decks, (iv) integrated framework for both the simplified and advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033 Circular, (v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model suitable for evacuation analysis, (vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specification and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and (vii) post-processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information for the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using three evacuation test cases for a ro–ro passenger ship

Serious games for the human behaviour analysis in emergency evacuation scenarios

This paper describes an experiment designed to elicit human behaviour when facing the urgent need of exiting an unknown building. This work is part of a larger effort to devise the methodological approach underlying the implementation of simulation of pedestrians and elicitation of their emergent dynamics, an experimental framework coined SPEED. To validate our experimental setup, a group of 16 experts on fire safety, emergency planning and building evacuation were consulted. The experts were solicited to answer a questionnaire, rating their gaming experiences and validating the questions in the form to be presented to subjects. Their comments were valuable inputs used in the development of the experiment described in this paper. A sample of 62 subjects was then used to test our approach, which consists in having the subjects answering a questionnaire and later on playing a Serious Game resorting to the Unity3D game engine. Some specific scenarios were carefully designed and presented to subjects, both in the questionnaire and in the game environment to maintain consistency of answers. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the challenge made players think about the various situations that might happen when facing an emergency. They are also implied to reason on their stream of decisions, such as which direction to take considering the environment and some adverse situations, such as smoke, fire and people running on the opposite direction of the emergency signage.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Biomechanical Locomotion Heterogeneity in Synthetic Crowds

Synthetic crowd simulation combines rule sets at different conceptual layers to represent the dynamic nature of crowds while adhering to basic principles of human steering, such as collision avoidance and goal completion. In this dissertation, I explore synthetic crowd simulation at the steering layer using a critical approach to define the central theme of the work, the impact of model representation and agent diversity in crowds. At the steering layer, simulated agents make regular decisions, or actions, related to steering which are often responsible for the emergent behaviours found in the macro-scale crowd. Because of this bottom-up impact of a steering model's defining rule-set, I postulate that biomechanics and diverse biomechanics may alter the outcomes of dynamic synthetic-crowds-based outcomes. This would mean that an assumption of normativity and/or homogeneity among simulated agents and their mobility would provide an inaccurate representation of a scenario. If these results are then used to make real world decisions, say via policy or design, then those populations not represented in the simulated scenario may experience a lack of representation in the actualization of those decisions. A focused literature review shows that applications of both biomechanics and diverse locomotion representation at this layer of modelling are very narrow and often not present. I respond to the narrowness of this representation by addressing both biomechanics and heterogeneity separately. To address the question of performance and importance of locomotion biomechanics in crowd simulation, I use a large scale comparative approach. The industry standard synthetic crowd models are tested under a battery of benchmarks derived from prior work in comparative analysis of synthetic crowds as well as new scenarios derived from built environments. To address the question of the importance of heterogeneity in locomotion biomechanics, I define tiers of impact in the multi-agent crowds model at the steering layer--from the action space, to the agent space, to the crowds space. To this end, additional models and layers are developed to address the modelling and application of heterogeneous locomotion biomechanics in synthetic crowds. The results of both studies form a research arc which shows that the biomechanics in steering models provides important fidelity in several applications and that heterogeneity in the model of locomotion biomechanics directly impacts both qualitative and quantitative synthetic crowds outcomes. As well, systems, approaches, and pitfalls regarding the analysis of steering model and human mobility diversity are described

From individual behaviour to an evaluation of the collective evolution of crowds along footbridges

This paper proposes a crowd dynamic macroscopic model grounded on microscopic phenomenological observations which are upscaled by means of a formal mathematical procedure. The actual applicability of the model to real world problems is tested by considering the pedestrian traffic along footbridges, of interest for Structural and Transportation Engineering. The genuinely macroscopic quantitative description of the crowd flow directly matches the engineering need of bulk results. However, three issues beyond the sole modelling are of primary importance: the pedestrian inflow conditions, the numerical approximation of the equations for non trivial footbridge geometries, and the calibration of the free parameters of the model on the basis of in situ measurements currently available. These issues are discussed and a solution strategy is proposed.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures in J. Engrg. Math., 201

Modeling, Evaluation, and Scale on Artificial Pedestrians: A Literature Review

Modeling pedestrian dynamics and their implementation in a computer are challenging and important issues in the knowledge areas of transportation and computer simulation. The aim of this article is to provide a bibliographic outlook so that the reader may have quick access to the most relevant works related to this problem. We have used three main axes to organize the article's contents: pedestrian models, validation techniques, and multiscale approaches. The backbone of this work is the classification of existing pedestrian models; we have organized the works in the literature under five categories, according to the techniques used for implementing the operational level in each pedestrian model. Then the main existing validation methods, oriented to evaluate the behavioral quality of the simulation systems, are reviewed. Furthermore, we review the key issues that arise when facing multiscale pedestrian modeling, where we first focus on the behavioral scale (combinations of micro and macro pedestrian models) and second on the scale size (from individuals to crowds). The article begins by introducing the main characteristics of walking dynamics and its analysis tools and concludes with a discussion about the contributions that different knowledge fields can make in the near future to this exciting area

Intergrating the Fruin LOS into the Multi-Objective Ant Colony System

Building evacuation simulation provides the planners and designers an opportunity to analyse the designs and plan a precise, scenario specific instruction for disaster times. Nevertheless, when disaster strikes, the unexpected may happen and many egress paths may get blocked or the conditions of evacuees may not let the execution of emergency plans go smoothly. During disaster times, effective route-finding methods can help efficient evacuation process, in which the directors are able to react to the sudden changes in the environment. This research tries to integrate the highly accepted human dynamics methods proposed by Fruin into the Ant-Colony optimisation route-finding method. The proposed method is designed as a multi-objective ant colony system, which tries to minimize the congestions in the bottlenecks during evacuations, in addition to the egress time, and total traversed time by evacuees. This method embodies the standard crowd dynamics method in the literature, which are Fruin LOS and pedestrian speed. The proposed method will be tested against a baseline method, that is shortest path, in terms of the objective functions, which are evacuation time and congestion degree. The results of the experiment show that a multi-objective ant colony system performance is able to reduce both egress time and congestion degree in an effective manner, however, the method efficiency drops when the evacuee population is small. The integration of Fruin LOS also produces more meaningful results, as the load responds to the Level of Service, rather than the density of the crowd, and the Level of Service is specifically designed for the sake of measuring the ease of crowd movement

VELOS: A VR Platform for Ship-Evacuation Analysis

“Virtual Environment for Life On Ships” (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design Process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic Conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This paper focuses On presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and Evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: i) capability of multiple Users’ immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, ii) Real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment Events and crowd-behavior parameters, iii) capability of agents and Avatars to move continuously on decks, iv) integrated framework for both the Simplified and the advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033 Circular, v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model Suitable for evacuation analysis, vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specification and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and vii) post Processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information For the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using Three evacuation test cases for a ro-ro passenger ship

Interfacing Building Response with Human Behavior Under Seismic Events

The goal of this paper is to model the interaction of humans with their built environment during and immediately following a natural disaster. The study uses finite element simulations to evaluate the response of buildings under input ground motions and agent-based dynamic modeling to model the subsequent evacuation of building occupants in the study area immediately following the seismic event. The structural model directly captures building damage and collapse, as well as floor accelerations and displacements to determine nonstructural damage, injuries and fatalities. The goal of this research is to make connections between building damage and occupant injuries, with geographic automata as the information handler for the agent-based platform. This research demonstrates that human behavior and evacuation patterns can be evaluated in the context of realistic structural and nonstructural damage assessments, and that prior knowledge of evacuation patterns is critical for adequate preparedness of cities to severe earthquakes

Interfacing Building Response with Human Behavior Under Seismic Events

The goal of this paper is to model the interaction of humans with their built environment during and immediately following a natural disaster. The study uses finite element simulations to evaluate the response of buildings under input ground motions and agent-based dynamic modeling to model the subsequent evacuation of building occupants in the study area immediately following the seismic event. The structural model directly captures building damage and collapse, as well as floor accelerations and displacements to determine nonstructural damage, injuries and fatalities. The goal of this research is to make connections between building damage and occupant injuries, with geographic automata as the information handler for the agent-based platform. This research demonstrates that human behavior and evacuation patterns can be evaluated in the context of realistic structural and nonstructural damage assessments, and that prior knowledge of evacuation patterns is critical for adequate preparedness of cities to severe earthquakes