Inflow process of pedestrians to a confined space

To better design safe and comfortable urban spaces, understanding the nature of human crowd movement is important. However, precise interactions among pedestrians are difficult to measure in the presence of their complex decision-making processes and many related factors. While extensive studies on pedestrian flow through bottlenecks and corridors have been conducted, the dominant mode of interaction in these scenarios may not be relevant in different scenarios. Here, we attempt to decipher the factors that affect human reactions to other individuals from a different perspective. We conducted experiments employing the inflow process in which pedestrians successively enter a confined area (like an elevator) and look for a temporary position. In this process, pedestrians have a wider range of options regarding their motion than in the classical scenarios; therefore, other factors might become relevant. The preference of location is visualized by pedestrian density profiles obtained from recorded pedestrian trajectories. Non-trivial patterns of space acquisition, e.g., an apparent preference for positions near corners, were observed. This indicates the relevance of psychological and anticipative factors beyond the private sphere, which have not been deeply discussed so far in the literature on pedestrian dynamics. From the results, four major factors, which we call flow avoidance, distance cost, angle cost, and boundary preference, were suggested. We confirmed that a description of decision-making based on these factors can give a rise to realistic preference patterns, using a simple mathematical model. Our findings provide new perspectives and a baseline for considering the optimization of design and safety in crowded public areas and public transport carriers.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Invisible control of self-organizing agents leaving unknown environments

In this paper we are concerned with multiscale modeling, control, and simulation of self-organizing agents leaving an unknown area under limited visibility, with special emphasis on crowds. We first introduce a new microscopic model characterized by an exploration phase and an evacuation phase. The main ingredients of the model are an alignment term, accounting for the herding effect typical of uncertain behavior, and a random walk, accounting for the need to explore the environment under limited visibility. We consider both metrical and topological interactions. Moreover, a few special agents, the leaders, not recognized as such by the crowd, are "hidden" in the crowd with a special controlled dynamics. Next, relying on a Boltzmann approach, we derive a mesoscopic model for a continuum density of followers, coupled with a microscopic description for the leaders' dynamics. Finally, optimal control of the crowd is studied. It is assumed that leaders exploit the herding effect in order to steer the crowd towards the exits and reduce clogging. Locally-optimal behavior of leaders is computed. Numerical simulations show the efficiency of the optimization methods in both microscopic and mesoscopic settings. We also perform a real experiment with people to study the feasibility of the proposed bottom-up crowd control technique.Comment: in SIAM J. Appl. Math, 201

A Study and Estimation a Lost Person Behavior in Crowded Areas Using Accelerometer Data from Smartphones

As smartphones become more popular, applications are being developed with new and innovative ways to solve problems in the day-to-day lives of users. One area of smartphone technology that has been developed in recent years is human activity recognition (HAR). This technology uses various sensors that are built into the smartphone to sense a person\u27s activity in real time. Applications that incorporate HAR can be used to track a person\u27s movements and are very useful in areas such as health care. We use this type of motion sensing technology, specifically, using data collected from the accelerometer sensor. The purpose of this study is to study and estimate the person who may become lost in a crowded area. The application is capable of estimating the movements of people in a crowded area, and whether or not the person is lost in a crowded area based on his/her movements as detected by the smartphone. This will be a great benefit to anyone interested in crowd management strategies. In this paper, we review related literature and research that has given us the basis for our own research. We also detail research on lost person behavior. We looked at the typical movements a person will likely make when he/she is lost and used these movements to indicate lost person behavior. We then evaluate and describe the creation of the application, all of its components, and the testing process

Understanding the Internet: Model, Metaphor, and Analogy

published or submitted for publicatio

Detect the unexpected: a science for surveillance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for research development focused on addressing the neglected role of visual perception in real life tasks such as policing surveillance and command and control settings. Approach – The scale of surveillance task in modern control room is expanding as technology increases input capacity at an accelerating rate. The authors review recent literature highlighting the difficulties that apply to modern surveillance and give examples of how poor detection of the unexpected can be, and how surprising this deficit can be. Perceptual phenomena such as change blindness are linked to the perceptual processes undertaken by law-enforcement personnel. Findings – A scientific programme is outlined for how detection deficits can best be addressed in the context of a multidisciplinary collaborative agenda between researchers and practitioners. The development of a cognitive research field specifically examining the occurrence of perceptual “failures” provides an opportunity for policing agencies to relate laboratory findings in psychology to their own fields of day-to-day enquiry. Originality/value – The paper shows, with examples, where interdisciplinary research may best be focussed on evaluating practical solutions and on generating useable guidelines on procedure and practice. It also argues that these processes should be investigated in real and simulated context-specific studies to confirm the validity of the findings in these new applied scenarios

Crowd Simulation Incorporating Agent Psychological Models, Roles and Communication

We describe a new architecture to integrate a psychological model into a crowd simulation system in order to obtain believable emergent behaviors. Our existing crowd simulation system (MACES) performs high level wayfinding to explore unknown environments and obtain a cognitive map for navigation purposes, in addition to dealing with low level motion within each room based on social forces. Communication and roles are added to achieve individualistic behaviors and a realistic way to spread information about the environment. To expand the range of realistic human behaviors, we use a system (PMFserv) that implements human behavior models from a range of ability, stress, emotion, decision theoretic and motivation sources. An architecture is proposed that combines and integrates MACES and PMFserv to add validated agent behaviors to crowd simulations

Comparison of crowd simulation for building evacuation and an alternative approach

This paper presents an overview of crowd simulation models, their limitations, and an alternative agent-based approch. First we introduce several methods and then we focus on two widely used and validated simulation tools that use grid-based models. We discus the artifacts that these models introduce regarding the way they treat the space and the implication that this has in the movement of the agents during the simulation. We also describe the limitations that current commercial software tools have in terms of simulating human psychology and physiology. The paper discusses an agent-based alternative approach developed to overcome these limitations. The model allows for the simulation of human movement that can provide results more closely describing behavior of real people during an emergency situation. Flow rates, densities and speeds emerge in our model from the physical interactions between people instead of being predefined.Postprint (published version

Ubitrack: A Study on Lost Person Activity Estimation Using Accelerometer Data from Smartphones

As smartphones become very more popular, applications are being developed with new and innovative ways to solve problems faced in the day-to-day lives of users. One area of smartphone technology that has been developed in recent years is human activity recognition HAR. This technology uses various sensors that are built into the smartphone to sense a person\u27s activity in real time. Applications that incorporate HAR can be used to track a person\u27s movements and are very useful in areas such as health care. In our research, we use this type of motion sensing technology, specifically, using data collected from the accelerometer sensor. The purpose of this study is to estimate the pilgrim who may become lost on the annual pilgrimage to Hajj. The application is capable of estimating the movements of people in a crowded area, and of indicating whether or not the person is lost in a crowded area based on his/her movements as detected by the smartphone. This will be a great benefit to anyone interested in crowd management strategies, specifically regarding Hajj. In this thesis, we review related literature and research that has given us the basis for our own research. For example, we could not create this application without the use of HAR technology and without specific classification algorithms. We also detail research on lost person behavior. We looked at the typical movements a person will likely make when he/she is lost and used these movements to indicate lost person behavior. We then describe the creation of the application, all of its components, and the testing process. Finally, we discuss the results of our trials and plans for future work

Modeling rationality to control self-organization of crowds: An environmental approach

In this paper we propose a classification of crowd models in built environments based on the assumed pedestrian ability to foresee the movements of other walkers. At the same time, we introduce a new family of macroscopic models, which make it possible to tune the degree of predictiveness (i.e., rationality) of the individuals. By means of these models we describe both the natural behavior of pedestrians, i.e., their expected behavior according to their real limited predictive ability, and a target behavior, i.e., a particularly efficient behavior one would like them to assume (for, e.g., logistic or safety reasons). Then we tackle a challenging shape optimization problem, which consists in controlling the environment in such a way that the natural behavior is as close as possible to the target one, thereby inducing pedestrians to behave more rationally than what they would naturally do. We present numerical tests which elucidate the role of rational/predictive abilities and show some promising results about the shape optimization problem

Study of Heterogeneous Agents Crowd Dynamic

Di dalam situasi kecemasan, orang ramai sering mempamerkan tingkah laku tidak menentu yang boleh membawa kepada malapetaka yang besar jika tidak ditangani dengan baik. Fokus utama kajian ini adalah untuk mengkaji ejen heterogen di khalayak ramai dalam kepadatan yang berbeza, di dalam arena tertentu. Pemodelan dan simulasi ejen heterogen di khalayak ramai memerlukan pemahaman tingkah laku manusia. Apabila keadaan panik berlaku, setiap individu bertindak balas secara berbeza di mana ia bergantung kepada pelbagai faktor seperti sentuhan fizikal, emosi, daya tarikan, tempat dan lain-lain lagi. Kombinasi tingkah laku individu ini akhirnya mewujudkan tingkah laku orang ramai. Apabila keadaan panik berlaku, motivasi setiap ejen meninggalkan arena secepat mungkin dengan mematuhi peraturan pengikut, pengelompokan dan mengelak halangan. Model ini dilaksanakan menggunakan NetLogo versi 5.0.4, di mana alat simulasi ini memberi kecekapan yang tinggi sesuai untuk mengsimulasi fenomena yang kompleks. Analisis utama projek ini ialah mengira purata masa pemindahan dan kadar tindak balas untuk meninggalkan arena di bawah pengaruh dua pembolehubah. Apabila peratusan ejen B bertambah, purata masa pemindahan dan kadar tindak balas menjadi lebih baik. Manakala, apabila bilangan populasi meningkat, kadar tindak balas untuk meninggalkan arena menjadi lebih cepat, namun purata masa pemindahan menjadi perlahan. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ In an emergency, members of a crowd often exhibit unpredictable behavior which can lead to major catastrophes if not well managed. The focus of this research was to study the crowd dynamics of heterogeneous agents, at differing densities, within a particular enclosed arena. Modelling and simulating the crowd dynamics of heterogeneous agents requires an understanding of human behavior. Each individual reacts differently to a panic, based on diverse factors like physical contact, emotion, attraction, sights and many others. It is the combination of these individual behaviors that ultimately affects crowd behavior. When a panic occurs, the motivation of each agent is to leave the arena as soon as possible by obeying the flocking rule, the follower rule, and obstacle avoidance rule. The implementation of this model was done using NetLogo version 5.0.4, which provided great efficiency in simulating multiple agents and is suitable for simulating complex phenomena. The analysis of this project focuses on average evacuation time and response rate to clear the arena under the influence of two variables. As the percentage of B agents (able to see 15 patches, and simulating greater knowledge of the arena) increased, the average evacuation time and response rate improved. As the population increased, the response rate to clear the arena become faster, however the average evacuation time become slower