Modeling Crowd and Trained Leader Behavior during Building Evacuation

This article considers animating evacuation in complex buildings by crowds who might not know the structure\u27s connectivity, or who find routes accidently blocked. It takes into account simulated crowd behavior under two conditions: where agents communicate building route knowledge, and where agents take different roles such as trained personnel, leaders, and followers

Quantitative validation of PEDFLOW for description of unidirectional pedestrian dynamics

The results of a systematic quantitative validation of PEDFLOW based on the experimental data from FZJ are presented. Unidirectional flow experiments, totaling 28 different combinations with varying entry, corridor and exit widths, were considered. The condition imposed on PEDFLOW was that all the cases should be run with the same input parameters. The exit times and fundamental diagrams for the measuring region were evaluated and compared. This validation process led to modifications and enhancements of the model underlying PEDFLOW. The preliminary conclusions indicate that the results agree well for densities smaller than 3 m-2 and a good agreement is observed even at high densities for the corridors with bcor = 2.4 m, and bcor = 3.0 m. For densities between 1 and 2 m-2 the specific flow and velocities are underpredicted by PEDFLOW.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 1 Table, conference PED201

Agent-Based Simulation Of Crowd At The Tawaf Area.

Every year during the Hajj season there is a concentration of more than two million people within the vicinity of the Masjid Al-Haram. Congested areas, such as the tawaf,, may reach beyond a safe level of four people per square meter during this peak period. The Tawaf area together with the Ottoman construction is able to accommodate up to 72,000 people (in a praying position). Simulation of the movement and behavior of such a huge crowd can be useful in managing this important event. One of the recent trends in modeling and simulation is the agent technology which has been used to model and simulate various phenomenon such as the study of land use, infectious disease modeling, economic and business study, urban dynamic and also pedestrian modeling. In this paper we use multi-agent based method to simulate the crowd at the Tawaf area. We present the architecture of the software platform which implements our proposed model and briefly report our early experience in using- Repast J which is an agent-based simulation toolkit to model the crowd at the area

Fluid-Based Analysis of Pedestrian Crowd at Bottlenecks

In emergency egress crowd behavior critically affects egress efficiency and public safety. By integrating psychological principles to Newtonian motion of crowd, a fluid-based equation is derived in this paper to explore how energy in different forms is balanced when pedestrian crowd pass through a bottleneck. Such fluid-based analysis helps to bridge a gap among psychological findings, pedestrian models and simulation results, and it further provides a new perspective to understand how the faster-is-slower effect is caused and how disastrous events (e.g., jamming) occur at a bottleneck passage.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

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

Leadership emergence in walking groups

Understanding the mechanisms underlying the emergence of leadership in multi-agent systems is still under investigation in many areas of research where group coordination is involved. While leadership has been mostly investigated in the case of animal groups, only a few works address the problem of leadership emergence in human ensembles, e.g. pedestrian walking, group dance. In this paper we study the emergence of leadership in the specific scenario of a small walking group. Our aim is to unveil the main mechanisms emerging in a human group when leader or follower roles are not designated a priori. Two groups of participants were asked to walk together and turn or change speed at self-selected times. Data were analysed using time-dependent cross correlation to infer leader-follower interactions between each pair of group members. The results indicate that leadership emergence is due both to contextual factors, such as an individual's position in the group, and to personal factors, such as an individual's characteristic locomotor behaviour. Our approach can easily be extended to larger groups and other scenarios such as team sports and emergency evacuations

Being a Part of the Crowd: Towards Validating VR Crowds Using Presence

Crowd simulation models are currently lacking a commonly accepted validation method. In this paper, we propose level of presence achieved by a human in a virtual environment (VE) as a metric for virtual crowd behavior. Using experimental evidence from the presence literature and the results of a pilot experiment that we ran, we explore the egocentric features that a crowd simulation model should have in order to achieve high levels of presence and thus be used as a framework for validation of simulated crowd behavior. We implemented four crowd models for our pilot experiment: social forces, rule based, cellular automata and HiDAC. Participants interacted with the crowd members of each model in an immersive virtual environment for the purpose of studying presence in virtual crowds, with the goal of establishing the basis for a future validation method

Environmental effect on egress simulation

Abstract. Evacuation and egress simulations can be a useful tool for studying the effect of design decisions on the flow of agent movement. This type of simulation can be used to determine before hand the effect of design decisions and enable exploration of potential improvements. In this work, we study at how agent egress is affected by the environment in real world and large scale virtual environments and investigate metrics to analyze the flow. Our work differs from many evacuation systems in that we support grouping restrictions between agents (e.g., families or other social groups traveling together), and model scenarios with multiple modes of transportation with physically realistic dynamics (e.g., individuals walk from a building to their own cars and leave only when all people in the group arrive).

Developing a model of evacuation after an earthquake in Lebanon

This article describes the development of an agent-based model (AMEL, Agent-based Model for Earthquake evacuation in Lebanon) that aims at simulating the movement of pedestrians shortly after an earthquake. The GAMA platform was chosen to implement the model. AMEL is applied to a real case study, a district of the city of Beirut, Lebanon, which potentially could be stricken by a M7 earthquake. The objective of the model is to reproduce real life mobility behaviours that have been gathered through a survey in Beirut and to test different future scenarios, which may help the local authorities to target information campaigns.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures, ISCRAM Vietnam Conference, November 201

Influence of Information-Hearsay on Wide-Area Evacuation at a Large Earthquake

ABSTRACT In order to evacuate smoothly and safely at a large earthquake, it is important to obtain the information on property damages (such as street-blockage and fire) and on evacuation areas by hearsay, guidance and bulletin boards. In this paper, we construct a model, which describes wide-area evacuation, information-hearsay among evacuees and guidance behavior. Using this model, we evaluate the influence of information-hearsay on wide-area evacuation in terms of the evacuation time and the risk on evacuation routes. Simulation results demonstrate that the locational information of evacuation areas and damages is the most helpful for people who are unfamiliar with an area. In addition, we discuss the effective and efficient methods of evacuation guidance. The results show that the guides contribute to reducing the evacuation time and the risk on evacuation routes of evacuees, and sharing information among guides enables more efficient and safer evacuation / guidance